Recording employee working hours in a small team: what to log and how to keep it simple

Petruț NicolaeOptometrist · Store manager in medical optics2 October 2026 · 5 min read

With a team of three, five or ten people, timesheets feel like a detail. Until there is a labour inspection, a dispute about a missing day, or the end of the month when the hours have to go to your accountant.

Why a daily record matters

In 2019 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled (case C-55/18) that EU countries must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system for measuring the time each worker works every day. Each country turns this into its own rules, but the direction is the same across the EU: a record kept daily, not reconstructed from memory at the end of the month.

Rules differ by country, so check the details with your accountant. The good practice, though, is the same everywhere.

What the record should contain

For every employee and every day:

• name and role;
• status of the day: worked, day off, annual leave, sick leave, absent;
• on working days: start time and end time;
• total hours, calculated correctly.

At the end of the month you need a timesheet with totals, signed by whoever prepared it and whoever approved it.

Where small teams usually go wrong

• Filled in at the end of the month. Nobody remembers who left early on the 7th.
• No times. Just an "X" or "8", with no start and end time.
• Broken totals. One deleted formula in a spreadsheet and the month is wrong, unnoticed.
• Lost sheets. The paper log stays in a drawer, or with a colleague on holiday.

How to keep it in seconds a day

The rule that works: timesheets are done the same day, by the same person, at closing time. It takes a minute if the tool is simple.

1. Add the team once: name, role, signature.
2. Every day, mark each person's status. If the whole team worked the same hours, mark everyone at once.
3. For "worked", enter start and end time; the hours are calculated for you.
4. At the end of the month, export the signed timesheet as PDF or Excel and send it on.

And employee data?

Timesheets contain employees' personal data, so the GDPR applies. The fewer places that data travels through, the better. A tool that keeps it on one company phone, with no cloud account, lowers the risk of it ending up where it should not.