The Duty to Record Working Time

In much of Europe, recording hours is not an administrative preference. It is a legal obligation, and it exists to protect the worker rather than the employer.

General orientation, not legal advice. National implementations differ substantially and are still developing.

Where it comes from

The Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC) sets maximum weekly working time and minimum daily and weekly rest.

Article 31 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees limits on working hours and rest periods.

In May 2019 the Court of Justice of the European Union decided Case C-55/18, brought by the Spanish union CCOO against Deutsche Bank SAE. The Grand Chamber held that Member States must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system measuring each worker's daily working time.

The reasoning is straightforward: without a record there is no way to verify whether the limits and rest periods are being respected, and the rights become unenforceable.

What the system must be

Three words from the judgment, each doing work.

Objective. Not an estimate, not a declaration of scheduled hours, not an absence calendar. A record of actual time.

Reliable. Resistant to alteration, and capturing what happened rather than what was planned.

Accessible. The worker can see their own record. This is the part most often missed, and it is the part that makes the record useful to the person it protects.

What is recorded

Start of daily working time, end, and rest breaks, at minimum.

Which means an absence calendar is not sufficient, and that was the specific failing in the case.

Retention varies by country, commonly measured in years rather than months.

National implementation

Varies considerably, which is why the general orientation here cannot substitute for advice on your jurisdiction.

Spain legislated relatively quickly after the ruling.

Germany's Federal Labour Court held in September 2022 (Case 1 ABR 22/21) that the obligation applies directly, ahead of specific national legislation.

Others have moved at different speeds, and several have deadlines still approaching.

The United Kingdom, outside the EU, requires adequate records to show compliance with weekly and night-work limits, which is a narrower duty than the CJEU standard.

What this means for a deployment

The obligation is to record hours. It is not a mandate to monitor activity, and citing it as one is inaccurate.

Accessibility is a design requirement, not a nice feature. If the worker cannot see their own record, the system does not meet the standard.

Self-reported timesheets sit awkwardly against "objective", and are widely used. Where they are the method, the surrounding controls — prompt entry, worker confirmation, protection against employer alteration — carry the weight.

Retention must be designed in, with a defined period and a defined deletion.

And it is the worker's record as much as yours, which is the framing that makes the whole thing easier to introduce.

What an inspector asks for

Five things, and four of them cannot be produced retrospectively.

The daily record — start, end, breaks — for a named worker over a named period.

Evidence it is accessible to the worker.

The retention policy, and a record from the earliest part of the period.

Rest periods and weekly limits computed from actuals.

The edit log, whose absence is itself a finding.

Run this on five of your own people before anyone else does, and time how long it takes.

Self-reported records and the standard

The awkward question most deployments have to answer.

The standard asks for an objective record. A weekly reconstruction typed from memory sits uneasily against that word.

Widely used, nonetheless, and the surrounding controls carry the weight: prompt entry, worker confirmation, protection against employer alteration, an audit trail.

The cleaner arrangement: a clock method covers the statutory record of hours, manual entry covers project attribution.

Most organisations end up there anyway. Designing it deliberately is better than arriving by accident and discovering the gap during an inspection.

Connect policy to configuration

The practical choices behind this note can be compared with employee attendance tracking software. Keep the organisation's written purpose in control of the setup, enable only the data needed for that purpose and review the result with affected users.