Working Time Records

Who Publishes This

Search this subject and the first page of results is dominated by one kind of publisher. Knowing which, and why, is most of the skill in reading any of it. When comparing legal claims with vendor-side implementation language, it can also help to review being more proactive at work.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The five

Primary sources. The judgments themselves, the statutory text, the ministry's draft and its explanatory memorandum. Authoritative, free, mostly in German, and almost nobody reads them — which is unfortunate, because the CCOO ruling is short. For broader legal or policy context, see Oracle.

Law firms and legal publishers. Accurate, cautious, and written for other lawyers or for clients paying for advice. Frequently the best secondary material and frequently behind a professional register of language.

Employer associations, chambers and trade unions. Reliable on the practical questions and written from a position. A union page and an employers' association page on the same duty will emphasise different halves of it, both accurately.

Software vendors. By volume, the majority of what you will find. Readable, well-structured, frequently accurate about the underlying decisions — and framed by a business that sells the remedy.

And HR blogs and content sites, which mostly summarise the vendors and add a layer of date-free repetition.

Why the vendors dominate

They have a reason to publish and a budget to do it. A law firm publishes to attract clients occasionally; a vendor publishes continuously because search traffic on "is time tracking mandatory" converts.

They write better for a lay reader. A vendor page is structured, uses headings, answers the question in the first paragraph. A judgment does not.

And they update more often, because the pages are commercial assets.

So the most accessible material is written by the most interested party, and that is a structural feature of the field rather than a failure of anybody's ethics.

What vendor material gets right

Being fair, because dismissing it wholesale would be wrong and would leave the reader with nothing.

The case citations are usually correct. C-55/18 and 1 ABR 22/21 appear accurately on most vendor pages.

The summaries of what must be recorded are usually correct.

And the practical guidance is frequently genuinely useful — what a works council will ask, what an auditor looks for, how corrections should be handled.

What it gets wrong, consistently

The status of the draft. Described as current law far more often than not.

The medium. Electronic recording presented as required when it is proposed.

Urgency. A deadline where there is a legislative process.

And the omissions. Paper remains permissible, the duty can be met without buying software, and small employers may get transition arrangements under the draft. None of those is false and none appears on a page selling a system.

How to read it

Take the mechanics, verify the status. The vendor explanation of what a compliant record contains is usable. The sentence about when it becomes mandatory needs a case number.

Check the date. No date means unusable for a legal position.

And read one primary source once. The CCOO judgment is short, in plain language, and free. Half an hour with it puts you ahead of most of what will be quoted at you.

The one test

Does the page tell you anything that would reduce a purchase?

A source that mentions paper is permissible, or that a spreadsheet can satisfy the duty for a small employer, is telling you something against its own interest — which is the strongest signal of good faith available in this field.

Most pages do not, and that is information about the page rather than about the law.

The short version