What the attendance register is, what art. 119 of the Labour Code says, who must keep one and which fields to fill in. Editable template included.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
For many small companies the attendance register (condica de prezență) is the first instrument for recording hours worked — and often the only one, until headcount grows and paper becomes hard to manage. Keeping it is a clear legal duty, not an administrative option. This article explains the legal basis, who has to fill it in, what data it must contain, and offers a simple, editable model of the mandatory fields.
The attendance register is the document (on paper or electronic) in which the daily presence of each employee at the workplace is recorded: time of arrival, time of departure and, where applicable, absences. It is the simplest form of working time record — a list, organised by day and by employee, signed or validated at each entry and exit.
Its role is twofold: internally, it helps calculate pay correctly (hours worked, overtime, absences); externally, it is the document the employer must produce during an inspection by the Labour Inspectorate (Inspecția Muncii).
The duty to keep a record of hours worked is set out expressly in article 119 of the Labour Code (Codul Muncii): the employer has the obligation to keep, at the workplace, a record of the hours worked daily by each employee, showing the start time and the end time of the working schedule, and to submit that record to inspection by labour inspectors whenever this is requested.
Three key requirements follow from the text: the record is kept daily, not reconstructed afterwards from memory; it must be available at the workplace (or, electronically, quickly accessible for the site in question); and it must state explicitly the start time and the end time of the schedule, not just a total number of hours. The law does not impose any particular form — paper register, table, electronic system — only that the record be real, daily and verifiable.
The duty falls on any employer, regardless of the size of the company or its field of activity — from a shop with two employees to a factory with hundreds. There is no threshold below which the record becomes optional, and it is generally kept at each of the employer’s workplaces, not only at the registered office. If the company has several sites (shops, warehouses, construction sites), each must have its own record available locally, for any inspection.
For employees under telework or remote work arrangements, the duty still applies — only the collection method adapts. The individual employment contract or the act adițional (an addendum to the employment contract) for telework may set out how the schedule is reported (by declaration, through an app, through remote electronic time tracking), but the employer must be able to prove, if needed, the hours actually worked, not just formal presence.
Whatever its form, an attendance record must allow the following information to be identified clearly, for every working day and every employee:
Without these elements, the register risks being treated as incomplete during an inspection — especially if the exact start and end times required expressly by art. 119 are missing.
A simple register template, organised by month and by employee, may contain the following columns: item no.; employee surname and given name; job title / department; date; time of arrival; time of departure; total hours worked in the day; overtime (if applicable); type of absence (CO — annual leave, CM — sick leave, time off by agreement, other — if applicable); notes; employee signature; signature/validation by the person responsible.
This set of fields can be transferred directly into a table (Excel, Google Sheets) or used as a paper form, one page per month, with one line for each working day of each employee.
Failure to keep a record of working hours under the conditions of art. 119 of the Labour Code is an administrative offence, punishable by a fine. In line with the rules in force at the date of publication of this article, we recommend checking the current amount directly on the Labour Inspectorate website or in a consolidated version of the Labour Code, as the levels of administrative fines may be changed by subsequent legislation.
Beyond the fine, the absence of a clear record carries a larger indirect cost: in employment disputes about hours worked, payment of overtime or dismissal for absences, an employer without a credible record effectively loses any means of proof in its favour.
The law does not favour one form over the other. A paper register and an electronic record have the same legal value, as long as both meet the legal requirements: they are completed daily, they state the start and end time of the schedule, and they can be made available to labour inspectors on request. The difference lies in efficiency and error risk: a paper register is easy to complete retroactively or incompletely and hard to aggregate for payroll, whereas an electronic record, correctly configured, captures the exact time in real time and can be exported instantly for an inspection or for the payroll register.
The three notions partly overlap, but they are not identical. The attendance register is the collective document, organised by day, in which all the employees of a site note their arrival and departure. The individual timesheet (fișa de pontaj) is the record of hours for each employee separately, usually consolidated monthly and used directly in the payroll calculation. The collective attendance sheet (foaia colectivă de prezență) is, in many companies, a synonym for the register, or it is the monthly summary resulting from the individual timesheets, attached to the payroll register. The register is the daily source of data, and the other two are aggregated forms derived from it.
The attendance register should not be confused with REGES (the General Register of Employee Records). REGES records each employee’s contractual data — hiring, changes, suspensions, termination — while the register records actual daily attendance. They are complementary: REGES confirms that a given contract is active on a given date, and the register proves how many hours the employee actually worked in that period. During an inspection, inspectors may check both in parallel.
Workly automates exactly the duty imposed by art. 119, with no later manual filling in: clocking in happens in real time, through a Kiosk with a rotating QR code and NFC card for teams on site, or through web/mobile for office and field staff. The start and end times of the schedule are recorded automatically, with a real timestamp, not entered retroactively.
The data then flows automatically into payroll, with export to SAGA, without re-keying and without the risk of mismatches between the attendance record and the payroll register. The entire time-tracking archive is available instantly, per employee or per workplace, in exactly the format needed for a possible ITM inspection.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. For your specific situation, always check the official source (the Labour Code, the Labour Inspectorate) or consult a specialist.
Night work guide: the 22:00–06:00 window, the 3-hour test, the choice between a schedule shortened by one hour and the 25% premium, medical examinations and protected categories.
Shift planning guide: the 12-hour daily rest and the 48-hour weekly one, night shifts, uneven schedules, the 4-month reference period and the rules on communicating the roster.
Overtime calculation step by step: the hourly rate, the minimum 75% premium, compensation with time off within 90 days, combining with the night premium and public holidays.
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