On 12th May next it becomes compulsory to keep a record of employees’ working hours. But this directive, passed into Spanish Law by Royal Legislative Decree, does not affect Spanish companies alone; it was in fact proposed at the request of the European Union Court of Justice and there are now quite a number of European countries which are obliged to meet similar measures.
What information should be recorded?
Companies are free to choose the recording system they prefer, but the reliability of the data must also be ensured. On the one hand, time of arrival and departure of each one of the employees has to be collected, and on the other hand, the company should have a working calendar on display.
Data should remain available for the four years following collection. They must be accessible for both employees and trade unions.
What should the working hours monitoring system be like?
The manner in which such data is collected may be: manual, with models which reflect the daily time of arrival and departure for each employee and signed by them every working day, or computer-based with the use of working hours monitoring software. On the market we can find anything from complex custom-designed systems, magnetic cards, fingerprint readers… to simple mobile apps or web applications with the basic functionality required.
Solutions
At ITislands (the business network for technological products and services from IT companies based in the Canary Islands) there are a number of companies offering products or services focused on this objective:
MHP’s Integrated Service for Schedule Management enables recording of the employee’s working hours and online management of attendance tracking, holiday requests, work leave and work absences by hours. The service includes all the necessary stages to ensure optimum performance.
Sirokko offers us Chronos, an in-house designed app which manages the time that the team devotes to different projects. It calculates deviations as for costs and budgets, and generates monthly working hours sheets.
• Other companies which also offer solutions relating to working hours monitoring are Inventia and Infinityloop.
Contact them if you would like further information.
