Time tracking in the workshop: legal duty, daily practice, and the time clock on a tablet

Time tracking sounds like something for large corporations with works councils — but it concerns every business with employees, including the three-person workshop. And the direction is clear: documentation requirements are getting stricter, not looser.

What does the law require?

In Austria, employers have always been obliged to record their employees’ working hours — start, end, breaks. In an audit by the labour inspectorate or in a dispute over overtime, only the records count.

In Germany, the European Court of Justice required systematic time tracking in 2019, and the Federal Labour Court followed in 2022: the obligation to record exists — regardless of how long the legislator keeps fine-tuning the details.

For both countries one more thing applies: statutory rest breaks (around 30 minutes after six hours of work) must be observed and verifiable.

Why the slip of paper on the wall isn’t enough

Handwritten timesheets fail in three places: they get filled in after the fact (and generously), breaks are missing, and in a dispute they barely hold up. On top of that comes the month-end arithmetic — target, actual, overtime, vacation — which reliably eats up an evening.

The modern solution: a time clock without time-clock hardware

A digital time clock no longer needs any hardware on the wall: a tablet in the shop is enough — every employee clocks in and out with their personal PIN. Anyone who’s out on the road clocks in on their own phone.

The obligation is handled well when the system thinks along:

• Statutory breaks automatically: after six hours, the minimum break kicks in on its own — correct for each country, without anyone needing to know the rules by heart.
• Plus/minus against the target: stored employment contracts supply the target hours; overtime and shortfalls are calculated on an ongoing basis.
• Forgotten clock-outs are detected and can be corrected with a note — traceable rather than swept under the rug.

That’s exactly how Staff Time in SimpliServ works — including vacation requests with one-click approval and pro-rated entitlement calculation.

The month-end close: an export instead of an Excel evening

The goal of the whole exercise: at the end of the month the time report is ready — hours worked, vacation, sick leave, target, plus/minus per employee — and goes as a CSV to payroll. No retyping, no recalculating, no arguments.

By the way: staff time tracking and job-based time tracking are two different things — one is for payroll and the law, the other is so that every working hour lands on the invoice. It helps when both come from one system.

Conclusion

Time tracking is mandatory — but with a tablet time clock, automatic breaks, and a ready-made payroll export, it becomes an afterthought of a few seconds a day. Anyone still collecting slips of paper gives away an evening every month and carries the risk on top.