Working Time Records

Not a Product

There is a duty to record working time, and there is a market in software for recording working time. They are related and they are not the same thing, and almost everything published about the first is published by the second. For a separate operational perspective on measuring work and activity, see remote employee monitoring software.

The merger has a cost, and it lands mostly on employers small enough that the software was never the answer. For a separate perspective on work, technology and organisational practice, see juris.

What the duty actually requires

A system that is objective, reliable and accessible, recording start, end and duration of daily working time.

Nothing in that requires a purchase. The CJEU set a functional standard; the Federal Labour Court did not specify a medium. Paper remains permissible under the current position.

A spreadsheet, a signed timesheet, a shared form — any of these can satisfy the standard for an employer of the right size and shape, provided it is actually objective, actually reliable and actually accessible.

That sentence appears on almost no page about this subject, and it is not controversial among lawyers.

Why the merger happened

Because the people explaining the duty sell the remedy. Not through dishonesty — through the ordinary fact that a page answering "is time tracking mandatory" is written by somebody with a product and read by somebody with a question.

Because "compliance" is a good frame for selling anything. It converts a discretionary purchase into a necessary one and moves the decision from value to fear.

And because the duty has an awkward origin, so a reader looking for certainty accepts the version that offers it, and the version that offers it comes with a subscription.

Who pays for the merger

Small employers. A company of eleven people with regular hours and stable staff can meet the duty with a form and a filing routine. Told it needs a system, it buys one, and the recurring cost is permanent while the compliance benefit over the form is zero.

And employers who buy the wrong thing. Much of what is sold as time recording is workforce management — scheduling, monitoring, productivity analytics — with the legal duty as the entry point. The duty requires none of it.

When software genuinely is the answer

Being clear, because a page arguing against buying can overshoot.

Shift work, variable hours, multiple sites. Paper does not scale and reconciliation becomes the job.

Anywhere payroll depends on the record. Manual transcription introduces errors that cost more than a licence.

Field staff and drivers, where a central paper record is impractical.

And any employer above a size where the filing routine needs somebody to own it. That threshold arrives earlier than small employers expect.

In all those cases buy the software because it suits the operation — which is a better reason than compliance and produces a better purchase.

The distinction to hold

The duty is a legal fact. The product is a commercial decision.

Keeping them separate changes both. The duty gets met, now, possibly with a form. The purchase gets evaluated on what it does for the operation rather than against a deadline somebody invented.

And it makes you a harder read for the urgency framing, which is the point of this section of the site.

The short version