Capturing hours in the field without a spreadsheet

On most sites, hours are noted in a pad, copied into a spreadsheet on Friday, then re-keyed into payroll the following month. Three entries for the same information, and at each step a chance to get it wrong — not counting the week the pad stays in the van.

What the law asks, and what it doesn't#

A common misunderstanding needs clearing up, because it leads to disproportionate systems.

What does French law require for counting hours?#

Where working time isn't the same for all employees, the employer must be able to produce a daily and weekly record of working time, and keep it available for the labor inspectorate. In a dispute over overtime, the employer has to produce evidence: the absence of a record counts against them.

On the other hand, the law requires no clocking device, no geolocation, no quarter-hour granularity. A reliable, dated, retained record is enough.

Can you use geolocation to count hours?#

One point that matters if you're considering it: it's subject to strict conditions and cannot be used to monitor working time where that can be done by another means. Declarative time tracking being another means, using GPS to count hours is slippery ground. Optimizing a route is a different matter — but then say so, and write it down.

Why time tracking fails#

Always for the same reason: the teams have worked out that it's there to watch them, not to pay them properly.

Why does field time tracking fail?#

Ask a team leader what happens to what they enter. If the answer is "no idea, it goes to the office", the system is already lost. They'll fill in the minimum, at the end of the week, from memory, rounding.

The three levers of acceptance, in order#

1. The employee sees their own hours. Weekly and monthly totals, overtime to date. Nothing does more for acceptance than being able to check your own count before the pay stub.
2. Entry takes under thirty seconds. Beyond that, it gets done later, therefore from memory, therefore wrong.
3. What's entered visibly serves a purpose. Hours feed the job's margin and the payroll. When a crew sees their record used to defend a quote in front of a customer, the relationship changes completely.

What convinced them was seeing their overtime add up as they went.

What works in practice#

The arrangement that lasts is always the simplest.

Entry happens on the task in hand#

The crew is already on a job, in the application, with their day's list. Clocking is a button, not a form. A start, an end, and the allocation is inferred from the open job.

Offline is not optional#

A basement, a car park, a dead zone: if the application needs a signal, it will be worked around in week one. Entry happens locally and syncs when the signal returns.

Approval happens the same day#

Not on Friday. Correcting today's error takes ten seconds; correcting Tuesday's error on Friday means remembering Tuesday.

Three checks are enough#

A day with no entry, an entry of fourteen hours, a finished job with no hours allocated: three checks that catch nearly every anomaly.

What it unlocks downstream#

This is the part underestimated at decision time, and the part that pays for the investment.

Job margin, in real time#

While hours arrive a month late, a job's margin is known at invoicing — in other words too late to act. With daily time entry, a job going wrong shows up in week two.

Payroll data stops being reconstructed#

Hours, on-call shifts and travel already exist; the monthly summary writes itself, and the manager checks instead of filling in.

Disputes become defensible#

A customer contesting an hours statement, an employee claiming overtime: in both cases you have a dated, approved record tied to a job.

The three mistakes to avoid#

Rolling out to everyone at once. One willing crew, one month, and fix what jams. A failed general rollout is very hard to recover from, because the second attempt starts with people against it.

Asking for more precision than you need. The quarter-hour rather than the minute, the job rather than the elementary task. Every extra level of detail degrades the quality of what's entered, and wrong data is worth less than coarse data.

Forgetting to write the notice. A time recording arrangement has to be brought to employees' attention, and staff representatives consulted where they exist. It's quick to do at the start, and very painful to retrofit.

How we capture the hours#

Time is logged from the phone of the person doing the work, attached to the right job, when they start and when they finish. No sheet to bring back on Friday, no reconstruction from memory.

The rest is a matter of compliance and format. The count respects what French labor law requires on working time, and the export takes the shape your payroll software or your accountant expects — with no retyping. See the scheduling and time tracking module.

Field time tracking: what to remember#

The law asks for a reliable daily record, not a surveillance system. Stay at the level of precision that meets the obligation.

Let everyone see their own hours: by far the biggest lever on acceptance, and it costs nothing to set up.

And remember that time tracking isn't a payroll subject. The same record gives you the job's margin, the month's payroll data and your evidence in a dispute. Three problems, one entry.