What are the legal requirements for time tracking?

At the moment there is still no concrete law on working time tracking, but there is an obligation to record working hours declared by the Federal Labour Court. The first draft bill for electronic time tracking is currently being debated in the Bundestag.

Why should you go for digital time tracking?

Not only because we live in a digitalized world and digital tools surround us every day. Digital time tracking also gives you a far wider choice of additional features to make the processes in your business more efficient.

8 Benefits of Digital Time Tracking for Businesses

These are the legal foundations

In May 2019 the European Court of Justice ruled that all European member states must pass a law on working time tracking. Until then, only working time that went beyond the daily working hours had to be recorded. That means all hours of additional work or overtime.

By September 2022, however, no law had been passed in Germany. Instead, the Federal Labour Court declared an obligation to record working hours, on the grounds that enough time had passed for every German business to have introduced a system for working time tracking.

After the written reasons for the judgment were published in December 2022, Hubertus Heil, the Federal Minister of Labour, announced that he would present a first draft bill to the federal government as early as the first quarter of 2023.

It arrived in April 2023 and is called the “draft bill on electronic time tracking”. With it, the Federal Ministry of Labour follows the requirements of the ECJ and sets out objective time tracking.

The draft now goes through the cabinet and then through the parliamentary procedure before it can be passed.

You can find all the details here.

8 benefits of digital time tracking

We explain in 8 benefits why time tracking is so important for your business and why you should go for the digital version:

1. ECJ compliance

With its ruling, the European Court of Justice did not only oblige member states to pass a law, it also set out what that law has to look like. It requires a time tracking system to be reliable, objective and accessible.

Graphic showing the ECJ criteria for time tracking

Objectivity and reliability are only possible with a system that runs on electronic devices. That can be chip systems, or a phone or an iPad. Accessibility at any time is made possible in the digital variant by cloud access. That way the data can be called up by authorised people at any moment and does not get lost.

2. Transparency

Digital time tracking offers a kind of communication that is often difficult inside a business. Recording working hours not only gives employers an overview of what their employees have done, it also gives employees security. Because overtime is recorded correctly and negative hours can be balanced out in good time.

Desk with a set of scales, a gavel, a pen and paper, a person sitting behind it with folded hands

3. Overview

The advantage of digital time tracking is that it offers more than just the automatic timesheet at the end of the month. As an employer you can call up your employees’ hours from anywhere and see who clocked in when. That can be helpful especially in flexible working models such as flextime, in order to keep track of when employees are available.

4. Resource management

But the overview does not only tell you when your employees are working. You can also plan much better where capacity may still be free, find cover more easily when someone drops out and schedule absences early. That way you work even more efficiently and with more foresight.

5. Digitalization

Over the past decades, digitalization has become an unavoidable topic for businesses. Recording your employees’ hours digitally is a big step into the digital transformation. With a digital system you can also keep other employee data, such as vacation days, sick leave notifications and target hours, online, entirely without ring binders. That gives you a better overview of this data. And by the way: it also saves space!

6. Less paper

Digital tools such as digital time tracking can make more than just personnel data disappear from the filing cabinets. Sick leave notifications and vacation requests can be handled digitally just as easily. Requests can be submitted through an app or the browser and do not end up on stacks of paper where they eventually get lost. Instead they can be processed in the system with a few clicks. That not only saves time and chaos, it also supports the company culture: bureaucratic matters are dealt with reliably and quickly.

7. Project time tracking

Issuing project-based invoices, planning projects reliably and keeping to schedules – that only works with correct project time tracking. With digital time tracking that is just one click after clocking in in the morning. So at the end of the month you have a precise overview and the hours worked on each project, which will make your billing enormously easier.

8. Project documentation

With the right tool you can do even more: not only record your project hours digitally via app, but also capture the status of your projects digitally. Through the app your employees document the project in text and pictures and let you stay up to date at all times, in the office or on the road. Instead of having to chase every piece of information by phone, all you need is a look into the digital project file.

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Digital time tracking for your business

The clockin app gives you the complete package of time tracking and documentation. Whether it is just the simple terminal in the office, time tracking on projects or the entire project file, the clockin app keeps you flexible and mobile. The user-friendly interface does without a lot of frills and is made for the job site.

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