You’ve probably already heard it in the media: Germany’s Federal Ministry of Labor is planning a reform of the Working Hours Act for 2023. But what does this mean for you and your company? Do you have to invest in expensive time tracking systems, or is a free software solution sufficient? In this article, we show you how to implement employee time tracking with minimal administrative effort while staying compliant with the law.

After the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in May 2019 that companies in the EU must track their employees’ working hours, German lawmakers took their time implementing this into national law. The Federal Ministry of Labor presented the first draft for reforming the Working Hours Act in April 2023. According to this, the start, end, and duration of daily working hours must be recorded—electronically and usually on the same day.

Previously, the Federal Labor Court had already set the facts with its decision from September 13, 2022 : It confirmed that German employers are required to track working hours in their companies. The idea is to protect employees from excessively long working hours, too few breaks, and too short rest periods.

According to the current Working Hours Act, employers must already ensure that

  • Regular working hours do not exceed 8 hours per workday or 48 hours per week on average.
  • Employees work no more than 10 hours per day or a maximum of 60 hours per week.
  • Employees take at least a 30-minute break on an 8-hour day.
  • After finishing their daily work, employees have at least 11 hours of rest before starting work again.

To even notice a violation of these rules, an employer must first track employees’ working hours.

In many companies—including possibly yours—trust-based working hours are still common. Here, the employer doesn’t define start and end times. Instead, employees are trusted to complete their tasks independently and keep track of their own hours. The value of work is measured by results, not mere presence, which is perfectly legal.

While this offers employees great flexibility and autonomy, it seems to be in stark contrast to mandatory time tracking. The purpose of time tracking is to make deviations from standard hours and especially overtime visible. The assumption is that people with trust-based working hours often over- or underestimate their actual hours and may not even know the legal requirements.

Without employee time tracking, it’s impossible to reliably detect consistently too many or too few hours. Overzealous employees may also be exploited under a trust-based system. What many don’t know: no one is required to do overtime—and if employers require it, they must compensate with pay or time off. If the contract states that overtime is covered by the fixed salary, this is invalid.

In most cases, trust-based working hours are still desired by both sides, as they foster a relationship of trust between employer and employee—a valuable asset that should not be harmed by time tracking. If this is how you’ve handled things so far, the solution could look like this: Employees record their working hours in a system that allows supervisors to check compliance with working time regulations, but employees still organize their work independently within the legal framework.

You can take advantage of this: While the employer is fundamentally responsible for proper and accurate time tracking, this task can be delegated to employees. Then, it’s up to them to determine and reliably document their own start, end, and break times.

The ECJ ruling requires an “objective, reliable, and accessible system” for recording daily working hours. But what does that actually mean?

Since the COVID-19 crisis, it’s clear: Home office is here to stay in many companies, and hybrid work is already the norm. While punch clocks gathered dust and time sheets were forgotten, digital solutions entered the workplace—there was simply no other way to track employee hours. For the future, this also means that punch clocks tied to office locations aren’t accessible if employees can’t log in remotely.

Many companies have switched from paper to digital spreadsheets for tracking hours. But that’s not a great solution either: For employees, entering hours in Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets is time-consuming and error-prone. It’s easy to make unnoticed typos or enter data in the wrong row or column. Plus, everyone keeps their own spreadsheets in different places, making it hard for managers and HR to consolidate and monitor the data. By the end of the month, they’re overwhelmed by a flood of digital time sheets.

So how can you record employee working hours quickly, easily, and in compliance with the law? With a SeaTable template designed specifically for this use case!

As with every SeaTable template, it’s a database with various tables that you can adapt to your specific needs. The first table provides an admin overview where all working hours, leave requests, and sick notes from your team are collected. As a manager, you have a full overview of all team members’ attendance and absences.

Admin view of the working time table

Admin view of the working time table

Using personalized user-ID filtered views , you can control exactly who can see what data, giving each employee their own timesheet with only their relevant information. Learn more in our YouTube tutorial .

To ensure both you and your employees always keep an eye on compliance with working time rules, SeaTable automatically calculates total hours worked and any overtime or undertime relative to the standard daily hours. With color-coded rows , you and your team can instantly see if the daily balance is negative (red) or positive (green).

In an employee app built with SeaTable, you can make data entry intuitive and user-friendly by letting employees enter working hours, leave requests, and sick notes via web forms . You can add specific instructions to the input fields to guide users through the process. Each completed web form corresponds to a workday, a leave request, or a sick note.

Employee app for time tracking, leave requests, and sick notes

Employee app for working hours, leave requests, and sick notes

When employees submit forms, SeaTable adds new entries to the relevant tables, which you as a manager can then approve or reject in the management app. On your dashboard, you can add statistics to keep track of all overtime, leave, and sick days for your team. The calendar also lets you display this data in a calendar view.

Management app for time tracking, leave requests, and sick notes

Remember: This is just a sample template we created for you. All basic functions are included in a free subscription, but for full functionality including automations you’ll need an Enterprise subscription. Of course, you can use many other SeaTable features to develop your own time tracking solution tailored to your company’s needs.

Learn more about our template here , which will revolutionize your time tracking.

Ultimately, SeaTable lets you map all necessary processes to record your employees’ working hours in compliance with current law and with minimal administrative effort. To ensure compliance with working time rules, you can always get a complete picture of your team’s hours and use a management app to analyze data for individual employees.

In SeaTable, you and your employees document time tracking, leave requests, and sick days in one central location, instead of maintaining scattered time sheets (e.g., in Excel or Google Sheets). All you need is an internet browser and an email address.

Still, time tracking is just one use case among the endless possibilities SeaTable offers. Explore our templates to see the impressive software solutions you can build with SeaTable—and get started right away with a free account .

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