The statutory working week is forty hours in non-agricultural sectors, with premium rates for overtime, night work, Sunday work and work on public holidays. Time and attendance records form the basis for these calculations and, in the event of a dispute before the Labour Inspectorate or a court, they constitute the main evidence available to both the employer and the employee. However, many companies view it as a punitive tool when it should be a measurement tool: it is used to determine how much time is actually worked, to pay fairly for overtime, to identify overstaffing and bottlenecks, and to adjust the organisation of work.
The choice of system must take its limitations into account. Paper registers or sign-in sheets are inexpensive but can be easily falsified, for example when a colleague clocks in on behalf of an absent colleague. A badge is more reliable, but it can be lent to others. Biometric systems, using fingerprint or facial recognition, offer the highest level of reliability, but they rely on sensitive data which requires formal approval from the Data Protection Commission and are only justified when other methods are insufficient. A mobile app with geolocation is suitable for field staff and sales representatives, provided that the individual is never tracked outside their working hours. The guiding principle remains proportionality: the least intrusive method that achieves the objective should be chosen, and a simple badge is often sufficient where biometrics would be excessive.