Time tracking has two faces in the trades: it’s a legal duty, and it’s hard cash, because only logged hours make it onto the invoice. Handle both with one motion, and you win twice over.
What the law requires
The Labour Act obliges employers to document their employees’ working time (Art. 46 Labour Act, Art. 73 Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act). What must be recorded includes in particular:
- start and end of daily working time, including the timing of breaks of half an hour or more,
- overtime worked,
- rest days and weekly rest periods, where these are not fixed.
Records must be kept for five years and shown to the authorities on request. The business is always responsible, even when employees log their own time.
Since 2016, relief rules have existed: simplified time tracking (only total duration per day) and waiving tracking altogether. Both require a provision in a collective employment agreement and largely autonomous working hours; waiving it entirely additionally requires a gross annual income above CHF 120’000. For tradespeople on site, this practically never applies: ordinary tracking duties apply in everyday trade work.
Paper is the most expensive route
Many businesses meet the duty with weekly paper timesheets, for example with the free time-and-materials report template. That works, but costs you in three places:
- Lost hours: if you fill in the timesheet from memory on Friday, you forget the extra trip to the wholesaler and the half hour of time-and-materials work at the neighbour’s job. Experience from businesses that switch to digital tracking shows noticeably more billed hours, often several percent of annual output.
- Duplicate work: collecting paper slips, deciphering them, transcribing them into the invoice and the payroll. Every transfer is a source of error.
- Patchy compliance: breaks and overtime rarely appear cleanly on the paper slip; exactly that becomes the problem in an inspection.
What the modern solution looks like
- Clock in and out on site, on your phone, in seconds. Start, end and breaks are documented this way, and the Labour Act is satisfied, without anyone keeping a log in the evening.
- Assign hours directly to the project: logged hours become time-and-materials line items on the invoice, with no transcribing. Together with a properly calculated hourly rate, that’s the most direct lever for more revenue.
- Overtime and holidays in view: balances run automatically; the “how many holiday days do I have left” discussion is off the table.
- Export for payroll and your accountant: logged hours flow into bookkeeping and to your accountant, instead of ageing in a folder.
This is exactly how time tracking is built in MeisterOffice: the team clocks in and out on mobile, the owner sees live who is checked in where, and every time-and-materials hour is on the project automatically by the end of the day. Pricing is here.
Frequently asked questions
Does the duty apply to me as the owner too? For owners without an employment contract in their own business, the Labour Act doesn’t apply. Tracking still pays off: your hours are the most expensive in the business, and unbilled owner hours are the most common leak in the costing.
Is an Excel sheet enough? Legally, yes, as long as all the mandatory details are reliably in there. In practice, Excel fails on discipline: entries get added retroactively instead of logged in the moment, and forgetting starts the moment you add things retroactively.
Can employees log their own time? Yes, that’s actually the normal case. Responsibility for completeness and retention stays with the business; spot-checking is part of that.