Employee time tracking: what is the best method for a company?

Keeping track of employees' entry and exit times during their working hours, as well as accounting for their overtime, became mandatory in 2019; since then, different systems for employee time control have been developed, seeking to offer the highest level of automation possible.

Control of the working hours of employees in a company

Time tracking in companies involves maintaining a record of working hours, from start to finish, for each employee in the organization; this record also includes overtime, breaks, and vacation absences. The publication of Royal Decree-Law 8/2019, of March 8 confirmed the mandatory nature of recording and safeguarding this record of hours worked.

There are two main reasons (and related to each other) for time tracking in companies: income from Social Security contributions and worker protection.

With this regulation, the goal is for employees to contribute to social security for all hours worked, while the Social Security collects the corresponding fees for those hours: not to mention, it's estimated that in 2020, in Spain, more than half of the overtime hours worked went unpaid.

In addition, these records must be kept for four years by companies, and be available to labor authorities, employees and unions; those who do not comply with this rule are exposed to fines of between 600 and 6,000 euros, approximately.

Best systems for controlling workers' working hours

Manual systems

It's the classic way of keeping track of hours at work: to do this, there has to be someone or a department dedicated to manually recording each entry and exit, through some physical medium or some Excel spreadsheet.

The aforementioned regulation does not specify the format in which companies must maintain these time records, so this system is often chosen by companies with few employees and limited technological resources.

Identification Systems

The most widespread way to control working hours is with the intervention of the employees themselves, who clock in and out using some identification method, such as an access card, fingerprint or through an application located on the company's intranet or on their smartphones.

Similarly to manual methods, this system requires employee proactivity to be 100% accurate.

Automated Systems

This idea is based on a digital time controller, which automatically associates the check-in with the employee's entries and exits at the workplace, without requiring any additional action on their part.

Raixer Offices consists of an electronic locking system linked to an application, which validates the access of each employee when entering or leaving work, and associates it with the registration system.

The best system for controlling employee working hours will always be the one that requires the least manual intervention by the company or the workers themselves, in order to adjust to the legal basis that regulates it.

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