Working Time Records

Electronic, Paper, or Either

This is not legal advice.

Two facts sit side by side here and get merged constantly: paper is legally permissible, and paper is a practical liability. Both are true, and treating either as the whole answer produces a bad decision. For a practical view of how organisations can translate recording duties into day-to-day workflows, see this reference.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The legal position

No medium is currently prescribed.

The CJEU set a functional standard in C-55/18 — objective, reliable, accessible — and named no technology. The Federal Labour Court's reasoning in 1 ABR 22/21 does not require electronic recording, a point the court itself made. For broader legal or policy context, see Heise.

So a paper record that is objective, reliable and accessible satisfies the duty.

The draft reform would change this, making electronic the standard with exceptions by collective agreement and for small employers, and transition periods by size. That is a proposal.

The practical position

Different, and it is where the two facts diverge.

Inspectors are reported to treat paper with increasing scepticism, particularly where discrepancies appear. A paper record that conflicts with other evidence is harder to defend than an electronic one with a change history.

Paper fails the "reliable" limb more easily. A sheet that can be rewritten leaves no trace of the rewrite. Meeting the standard on paper requires discipline that an electronic system supplies automatically.

And paper scales badly. For a handful of employees with regular hours it is entirely workable. At forty employees across two sites, reconciliation becomes somebody's job.

What paper has to do to satisfy the standard

If you choose it, these are the properties that matter — and they are the same properties the standard names.

Daily entries, not a week reconstructed on Friday. Reconstruction fails "objective".

Signed or initialled by the employee, which is the paper equivalent of accessibility and acknowledgement.

Corrections struck through and initialled, never overwritten. An erased and rewritten figure is the clearest way to fail "reliable".

Stored so they can be produced, in order, for the retention period.

And a copy available to the employee on request.

Meet those five and paper is defensible. Fail the third and an inspector has a reason to doubt the whole file.

What electronic has to do

Not automatic either.

A change history. A system that silently overwrites is no better than an erased pencil entry.

Employee access to their own record.

And export, so the record survives a change of supplier and can be produced to an auditor in a readable form.

Software does not confer compliance. A badly configured system can fail all three of the CJEU's words, and configuring it is the work.

How to decide

Under about ten employees with regular hours: paper is a legitimate choice, and the five properties above are the whole implementation.

Above that, or with shifts, sites, or payroll dependence: electronic, because the reconciliation cost exceeds a licence quickly.

And decide on the operation, not the deadline. The proposal has been imminent since 2023, and buying against a date nobody can name is a worse basis than buying against your own volume.

If you use paper now and the draft passes, you migrate. That is a known and bounded future cost, and it is smaller than three years of a subscription you did not need.

The short version