Time tracking in Switzerland: the law, the practice – and forgotten hours

Time tracking in Switzerland: the law, the practice – and forgotten hours

Friday evening, just before you log off. You open your timesheet and see two hours tracked. Yet the day was full. A customer call in the morning, forty minutes on the phone. Three ticket replies in the afternoon. In between, the short meeting that ran half an hour after all.

So there you sit, reconstructing. What you are doing is not tracking – it is estimating. And when in doubt you estimate low, because you do not want to overcharge anyone.

This article covers both sides of time tracking: what Swiss labour law requires of you, and what everyday practice costs you on top of that.

Part 1: What the law requires

In Switzerland, documenting working time is not optional. The Labour Act and its ordinance oblige employers to record their employees' working and rest times in a way that is traceable and verifiable. Enforcement lies with the cantonal labour inspectorates.

Since 2016 there has not been just one model, but three routes:

• Full recording. The standard case: the start and end of work as well as breaks are documented.
• Simplified recording. Only the total daily working time is documented, without start and end in detail. This is tied to conditions and has to be agreed on within the company.
• Waiving the record. Possible only for a clearly defined group – employees with substantial autonomy over their working time and an income above a defined threshold. This too requires an agreement.

On top of that come the break rules, which many underestimate in daily practice because they scale with the length of the day: from a certain working duration onwards, 15, 30 or 60 minutes of break are mandatory. You also have to keep the records for several years – they are not done with the monthly closing.

Important: this is an overview, not legal advice. Which model is permitted for your business, which thresholds apply exactly and what your industry or collective agreement adds on top is best clarified with SECO, your cantonal labour inspectorate or your legal advisors.

Part 2: The real problem is not the law

Most SMEs we know meet the obligation somehow. A spreadsheet, a time clock, an app – it runs. The expensive problem lies elsewhere, and it appears in no statute: the gap between what was actually done and what ends up in the system by the evening.

That gap is not the result of sloppiness but of how work looks today. Anyone jumping between ticket, phone, meeting and project cannot start a timer at every switch. So it gets entered in the evening – from memory.

Run the numbers for yourself. Assume twenty minutes per person per day get lost simply because they are forgotten when catching up. Over 220 working days that is about 73 hours a year. With five employees and a billable rate of 140 francs, we are talking about a five-figure sum – work that was done and paid for, but never invoiced.

Twenty minutes is a conservative assumption. And the figure is a calculation example, not a study: plug in your own numbers, and the result will still surprise you.

Part 3: Why “just remember better” does not work

The usual answer to this problem is discipline. Set reminders, preach timer culture, follow up on Fridays. That works for a few weeks and then quietly dies – because it is extra work nobody enjoys, and because it lands exactly when you are already under pressure.

The thinking error: time tracking is treated as something a human has to contribute. But the system has long known what you did. Your calendar knows the appointments. The phone system knows the calls and their duration. The ticket system knows when you wrote which reply. Those traces appear anyway – they are simply never compared with your timesheet.

Part 4: How saldiaCore makes the gap visible

That is exactly where the time gap detector in saldiaCore comes in. It takes a working day, collects that day's traces and holds them against your tracked time. It evaluates internal appointments, your Google Calendar, room bookings, phone calls including their actual duration, plus your ticket and task work.

The result is a suggestion, not an automation: “Forty minutes on the phone at 10:15, worked on this ticket in the afternoon – two hours are tracked. Is something missing?” An entry is only created once you confirm it.

Two details give away that we tested this on real working days:

• All-day blocks are dropped. A calendar entry spanning eight hours means “holiday” or “trade fair”, not “eight hours of billable work”. The detector ignores those blocks.
• Missed calls do not count. Calls under a minute are skipped, otherwise every unanswered callback would be proposed as working time.

And if you do not want to use AI, or the credit quota is used up, a simpler rule-based variant runs instead – the feature does not fall over.

What saldiaCore covers around it

The detector is the bonus. saldiaCore covers the obligation as well:

• A time clock with several sessions per day, including the distinction between office and home office as well as breaks – kept separate from project-based time tracking.
• Swiss break rules applied automatically, with 15, 30 or 60 minutes depending on the length of the day.
• Working-time records with multi-step approval from employees through HR to the lock, with deadlines.
• Balance tracking: cumulative hours, target versus actual, over- and undertime – and missing days that would otherwise go unnoticed.
• Worked versus rounded: you see the actual time next to the rounded billing duration, with the rounding of your choice.

The final step is the one that matters commercially: mark billable time as such and turn it directly into an invoice in bexio – grouped by task, project or date. The tracked hour therefore ends up on an invoice, not in a report.

Conclusion

You can meet the legal obligation with almost any tool. The more interesting question is what your current approach costs you – and you answer that by noting for one week what you enter retroactively in the evening and comparing it with your calendar.

If you want to know how this fits with your existing accounting: saldiaCore complements your bexio accounting with CRM, support, projects and time tracking – your accounting stays where it is. The saldiaCore product page gives you an overview of the whole platform.