PunchWhat's new in Punch 3.5: a guided welcome, team-based management, and managers who punch
Punch has grown deep. Travel pay, commission and bonuses, PTO that accrues, overtime rules for 25 countries, per-location rates. Punch 3.5 is the release that makes all of that approachable — it's about the first five minutes, who sees what, and letting the people who run a crew also work in it.
A guided welcome for every role
The first time you open Punch, you get a short walkthrough built for who you are. An owner sees how to set the business up. A manager sees what they approve and where. An employee sees how to punch in, take lunch, and request time off. Nobody sits through a tour of features they'll never touch.
Owners get one step further: a quick setup wizard that asks your industry, sets sensible defaults, and points out where each tab lives. And the first time you open Settings, a one-time deep-dive explains what's actually in there — because that's where the power is.
The walkthrough is shown exactly once, tracked on the server rather than the device, so it follows your account and never repeats across a reinstall or a second device.
Settings that do the math
Punch does a lot of payroll math for you, but only if it knows your rules. The new Settings deep-dive lays out what each setting does and how it pays off: overtime thresholds, weekly or bi-weekly pay periods, travel time, commission, and bonuses. Set the rules once, and Punch applies them to every paycheck automatically — no spreadsheet, no end-of-period reconciliation.
Team-based management
As crews grow, one manager rarely needs to see everyone. Punch 3.5 turns teams into a real permission boundary.
Assign a manager to one or more teams, and they see and approve only their own crew — plus anyone not yet assigned to a team. Owners still see everyone. The boundary is consistent everywhere it matters: approvals, time-off requests, the member roster, reports, and the dashboard all respect the same scope.
A manager left on no team keeps org-wide visibility, so nothing changes for smaller operations that don't need the split. And it's enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface — a scoped manager can't reach another team's data through any path.
Managers can punch too
In a lot of small businesses the manager is also on the tools. Until now, Punch treated managers as approvers only. In 3.5, give a manager a pay rate and they get the full punch experience — the Now screen and My Shifts — to track their own hours, hourly, salary, or by location.
Their shifts flow to the owner for approval, the same way an employee's do. A manager still can't approve their own time. One person, two roles, no workarounds.
Also in this release
More consistent paid status. A pay period marked paid now reads the same on every screen it appears — approvals, My Shifts, reports — including bi-weekly periods, which are keyed to the period's start across all of them.
Refined feel. Crisper, more legible buttons and tightened haptic feedback throughout, so the app responds the way an iPhone should.
Fully translated. Every new surface in 3.5 — the welcome flow, the setup wizard, the Settings deep-dive — is available in Spanish and Canadian French, the same as the rest of the app.
Getting started
The welcome flow runs itself the next time you sign in. Team-based management is ready whenever you create your first team in Members — until then, every manager stays org-wide, exactly as before. And every feature here is included on every plan, from Solo to Scale, like everything else in Punch.
New to Punch? Start your free trial — every feature, every plan, from day one.