Working Time Records

The Transition Myth

Ask a small employer about this duty and a common answer is that smaller businesses have longer. That belief is half true in a way that produces the wrong conclusion. For a separate operational perspective on measuring work and activity, see this page.

What is actually true

The draft reform proposes transition periods based on company size, and exceptions permitted by collective agreement, for the electronic recording requirement. For a separate perspective on work, technology and organisational practice, see Legal Tribune Online.

So smaller employers would get longer — to move to electronic recording, if the draft passes as described.

What is not true

There is no small-employer exemption from the duty to record. No size threshold exists. A company of six is covered as fully as a company of six hundred.

And the duty is not future. It binds since September 2022, for everybody.

So an employer with no records at all, believing they have a transition period, is not early. They are four years late, and the transition they are relying on concerns a medium requirement that does not yet exist.

How the belief forms

Because the two halves are usually reported together and the distinction is a subordinate clause. "Transition periods for small businesses" is what gets remembered from a paragraph whose subject was electronic recording.

Because a small employer reasonably expects a size threshold. Most regulatory duties have one, and the intuition that a six-person business is not the target of an EU working time directive is a sensible intuition that happens to be wrong here.

And because nobody selling systems corrects it. The urgency framing places the deadline in the future anyway, which is compatible with the belief and reinforces it.

The irony

Small employers are the group for whom compliance is cheapest and the group most likely to believe they are exempt.

A form, a same-day routine and a weekly check. For ten people with regular hours that is an hour to set up and ten minutes a week to run — the compliant option costs almost nothing, and the belief that it does not yet apply is what prevents it.

Meanwhile the same employers are being sold systems they do not need, against a deadline that is not theirs, for a requirement that is not yet law. Both errors run in the same direction: away from the cheap thing that would actually satisfy the duty.

What a small employer should do

Start recording, this week. Paper is fine. The whole implementation is on one page, and there is a checklist for employers under twenty.

Do not reconstruct the last four years. An acknowledged gap is a better position than a fabricated history, and reconstruction can be its own problem.

Do not buy a system because of a deadline. Buy one if and when the operation needs it — shifts, sites, payroll dependence.

And if the draft passes, migrate then, with whatever transition period applies. That is a bounded future cost and it is far smaller than three years of a subscription bought against a date nobody can name.

The short version