Recording working hours is mandatory in Spain for every company, regardless of size or sector. What changes from one to another is not the obligation itself, but how hard it is to meet when the system you use is a spreadsheet.
This article summarises, without jargon, what is expected from a small or medium business. It does not replace specific advice on your case, but it helps you tell whether you are on the right track.
What has to be recorded
The obligation is simple to state: the company must record the specific start and end time of each worker’s day, day by day.
Three consequences follow that are often overlooked:
- The record is daily and per person, not a monthly summary.
- It must reflect the actual working day, not the theoretical one in the contract.
- It must also exist for people working remotely or off site.
How long it must be kept
Records must be kept for four years and remain available to the workers, their legal representatives and the labour inspectorate.
This is what makes many homemade solutions unworkable. A spreadsheet overwritten every month does the job on day one and stops doing it the moment someone asks for the history.
What an inspection usually looks at
In our experience, the requests repeat themselves quite a lot:
- The complete record for a specific period, normally several consecutive months.
- The corrections. If an entry was modified, what it said before, what it says now and who changed it.
- Consistency with payroll and declared overtime.
- Accessibility: that workers can consult their own record.
Point two causes the most trouble. Correcting an entry is not unlawful — sometimes someone forgets to clock out — but not being able to demonstrate what was corrected and why certainly is a problem.
A documented correction is normal. An invisible correction is a hole.
Common mistakes in small companies
- Clocking in on someone else’s behalf. If the system allows it without leaving a trace, the record loses its evidential value.
- Recording only total daily hours, with no start and end time.
- Not recording breaks when the collective agreement treats them specifically.
- Keeping everything on one person’s computer, with no backup and no continuity if that person leaves.
How we solve it in OnTempo
When we designed OnTempo we started from exactly this list. Clocking in takes one tap from a phone or a computer, every record is sealed with its date and time, and any correction keeps the previous value along with the name of whoever made it.
When someone asks for the history, the report is downloaded by person and period, ready to submit. It is no more complicated than that, and that is precisely why it works.
If you have doubts about your specific situation, write to us and we will look at it with you.
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