Working time records used to be a back-office formality. Today they are a front-line compliance risk, and most employers only discover how exposed they are when an inspector, a former employee, or a payroll error forces the question.
In 2019 the Court of Justice of the EU ruled in CCOO v Deutsche Bank (C-55/18) that every member state must require employers to run an objective, reliable and accessible system for measuring daily working time. The direction of travel since then has been steady. Germany’s Federal Labour Court confirmed in 2022 that the obligation already applies to every employer, starting from the first employee. Spain is now moving to mandate certified, fully digital systems with real-time access for workers and inspectors. National rules still differ in their detail, though the underlying expectation has converged. The records you can produce are the ones that will protect you.
A working time records audit is how you find the gaps before someone else does. Here is how to run one.
Step 1: Define the scope
Decide which entities, countries, employee groups and time period the audit will cover. Employers operating in several countries should map the obligations jurisdiction by jurisdiction, since thresholds, retention periods and record formats vary. Give particular attention to the populations that are easy to overlook: remote and hybrid staff, senior executives (now covered in several countries where they were once exempt), and part-time, fixed-term and mobile workers. Problems tend to concentrate exactly there.
Step 2: Assemble the records and the rules
Gather the actual data first: clock-in and clock-out logs, timesheets, leave and absence records, overtime approvals, and on-call or standby logs. Set that data against the legal baseline each group is measured by. As a reference point, the EU Working Time Directive sets a 48-hour average working week over a four-month reference period that law or a collective agreement can extend, together with 11 hours of daily rest, a 24-hour weekly rest, a break once the working day passes six hours, and at least four weeks of paid annual leave. Your national rules may set the bar higher.
Step 3: Test the system itself
Confirm that your recording method meets the standard the Court set. It has to be objective, resting on real data captured as the work happens. Reliability matters too, so the record should be accurate and resistant to tampering. Workers, their representatives and labour inspectors also need to be able to see it. A spreadsheet filled in from memory at month-end looks tidy and still fails on all three counts.
Step 4: Reconcile records against reality
Cross-check the recorded hours against payroll, rosters and business activity. Certain signals give the problems away: identical daily entries, missing breaks, rest periods below the legal minimum, unrecorded overtime, and gaps for people you know were at work. Where the records and the pay diverge, you are looking at a compliance issue and a cost issue at once.
Step 5: Check retention and access
Make sure records are kept for as long as the law requires, commonly two years and sometimes more, and that you can actually produce them on request. An inspection is the wrong moment to learn that your data sits on a laptop that left with a former manager.
Step 6: Document findings and remediate
Write up what you reviewed, what you found, how serious each gap is, and a dated plan to close it with named owners. Put rest periods and maximum hours at the top of that plan. Breaches there carry health-and-safety consequences alongside administrative fines, and those fines already reach €30,000 in Germany and rise quickly in other countries.
Step 7: Make it repeatable
A single audit dates quickly. Set a regular cadence, once a year at the least, and more often while you are still closing gaps. If you are still working from paper or manual records, let the audit make the case for moving to a compliant digital system, which is the direction every major EU jurisdiction is now taking.
Non-compliance rarely announces itself. It arrives as a fine, a labour dispute you cannot win on the evidence you hold, or a payroll cost nobody planned for. A structured working time records audit turns that uncertainty into a short and fixable list.
Do you need help preparing for the audit?
