Working time records in Switzerland: what a business actually has to document

Sooner or later the question comes up in every business: is it enough if people write their hours on a slip of paper? The short answer is no — but the duty is less complicated than its reputation suggests.

Who is affected?

The basis is the Labour Act. It applies to the vast majority of private businesses in Switzerland, so also to the painting firm with three employees, the cleaning company and the car garage. Anyone with staff is, as a rule, required to document their working and rest times.

Certain sectors and groups of people are excluded — for example employees in a genuinely senior managerial position. For a typical trades or service business, however, the duty applies without restriction.

What has to be in the record?

This is not about monitoring every minute. What is required is a comprehensible record showing that the rules on working and rest time were observed. In essence:

• the daily working time actually performed, including compensatory and overtime work
• the position and length of breaks of half an hour or more
• the start and end of night and Sunday work, where it occurs
• the rest period between working days, where it was not observed

The records must be available for inspection by the cantonal labour inspectorates and are usually kept for five years.

The two exemptions

Since 2016, Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act has provided for two exceptions that many businesses are unaware of:

Simplified recording

People who can largely arrange their own working time only have to record the daily working time under certain conditions — no longer the start, the end and every break. This requires a written agreement, usually with the employee representation or collectively within the business.

Waiving the record

A full waiver is possible only for a small group: employees with a very high degree of autonomy over their working time and a gross annual income above a defined threshold. A collective agreement providing for it and an individual written agreement are also required. For most SMEs this route simply does not apply.

Why paper is still the problem

Legally, a paper record is permitted. In practice it fails at three points, and in the same way in every business:

• The slips arrive too late. By month end half are missing and nobody remembers what happened on the 12th.
• The slips cannot be analysed. The question "how many hours went into this job?" costs an evening.
• The slips get lost. Precisely when the inspection turns up or a customer disputes an invoice.

The real gain from digital recording therefore rarely lies in legal compliance — you can achieve that with paper too. It lies in the hours being attached to the right job the same day, and the invoice coming out of them in minutes instead of hours.

What a business concretely needs

Anyone leaving paper behind should look at three things. Capture has to work on the phone, otherwise it does not happen where the work does. It has to attach hours to a job, otherwise you have time tracking but still no job costing. And the data should sit in Switzerland or the EU, which settles the data protection question before it is asked.