Electronic time tracking for factories and shift-based production

A production hall running two or three shifts has different time-tracking requirements from an office: dozens or hundreds of people come and go in waves, at fixed times, sometimes in the middle of the night. A method designed for an office simply cannot keep up. Here is what matters.

The legal duty stays the same, but the stakes are higher

Whatever the sector, article 119 of the Labour Code (Codul Muncii) requires every employer to keep, at the workplace, a record of the hours worked each day by each employee, with the start and the end time of the schedule, available at any time to labour inspectors.

In a factory, that duty becomes far harder to meet “from a paper register”: three successive shifts, staff rotations, frequent overtime and a night shift make a paper record, filled in after the fact, almost impossible to keep correctly. At a large headcount, any time-tracking error multiplies — it is no longer one employee with the wrong hours, but dozens.

What is specific to production: shifts, nights, rotations

A few features of production work directly shape how time tracking has to be designed:

• Successive shifts (morning, afternoon, night) — the shift handover must be clear in the record, with no overlaps or gaps between one shift and the next.
• The night shift (22:00–06:00) — the night premium also comes into play: a schedule shortened by one hour, with no reduction in pay, or a premium of at least 25% of the basic salary for the hours in that interval.
• Rest between shifts. The general rule is a daily rest of at least 12 consecutive hours, but for shift work the Labour Code allows that minimum to drop to 8 hours consecutively. With frequent rotations, it is easy to lose sight of whether an employee actually had the minimum rest.
• A large headcount, high rotation — time tracking has to identify each person quickly and correctly, including when dozens of people arrive in waves at the shift change.

Time tracking thus becomes the main instrument through which the company can demonstrate, at any moment, that it observes the legal limits on working time and rest.

Which time-tracking methods suit a shop floor

In an office, clocking in from an app or a browser is enough. On a shop floor the conditions are different: many employees have no company phone, their hands are full, and at the shift change dozens of people have to pass through the clock-in point within a few minutes. The methods that fit:

• A kiosk at the entrance to the hall — a fixed station at the gate or at the entrance to the section, which the whole team passes through, without each employee having to take out a phone.
• An NFC card — the employee holds the card up to the station and clocks in with a simple tap; fast, familiar, and not dependent on signal or battery.
• A rotating QR code, shown on the kiosk and scanned from the phone app, for those who prefer the mobile route. Because it rotates — it changes periodically — it cannot be photographed and reused later from somewhere else, which reduces the risk of someone clocking in “from home” on behalf of a colleague.
• Integration with existing access control — time tracking lines up with the same passage points already used at the gate or in the sections, without duplicate infrastructure.

In practice the solution is often mixed: a card or kiosk at the gate for most of the team, a mobile option for TESA staff (the technical and administrative office personnel).

Overtime, the night premium, days off — and the link to payroll

In a factory, overtime is not the exception but frequently the rule at order peaks. Each overtime hour is compensated, in order, first with paid time off granted within the following 90 calendar days and, if that is not possible, with a premium of at least 75% of the basic salary. Work on public holidays has a separate rule: compensation with time off or, if that is not possible, a premium of at least 100%.

All these calculations depend on the quality of the record: if the shift record does not clearly distinguish the clock-in and clock-out time, the night shift, and actual overtime as against scheduled hours, the premiums are calculated wrongly. At a large headcount, re-keying hours into the payroll register by hand is where most errors appear — a forgotten shift, a missed night premium. A well-built electronic record removes that step: hours pass straight from the clock-in station into the payroll module, with premiums calculated automatically from real data rather than estimates.

ITM penalties, traceability and GDPR

The absence of the working time record required by article 119 is sanctioned as an administrative offence; under the rules in force at the date of publication, the fine for failing to keep the record is between 1,500 and 3,000 lei (check the current amount on the date of the inspection). An ITM inspection in a factory also checks how the recorded hours line up with the hours paid for each shift, as well as compliance with the minimum rest between shifts. Electronic time tracking, with a complete history that cannot be altered retroactively without leaving a trace, gives you exactly the traceability you need in an inspection or in a labour dispute, where the burden of proof falls on the employer.

Attendance data is personal data; the lawful basis for processing is, as a rule, the employer’s legal obligation (art. 119 of the Labour Code, read together with the grounds in the GDPR), with no separate consent for simply recording attendance. Biometric methods (fingerprint, facial recognition) are, however, a special category of data, with additional obligations — an NFC card or a QR code avoids them. Access to the attendance data of an entire factory must be strictly limited to HR and the section or shift managers.

At hundreds of employees, self-service matters too: access through which each employee sees their own hours, shifts and balances, without having to ask someone in HR every time — it reduces the administrative load and increases transparency, particularly where the schedule is organised in shifts.

How Workly approaches time tracking for production

For halls with a large workforce, Workly offers a physical kiosk with a rotating QR code and NFC card — a single station at the entrance through which the team clocks in quickly, with or without a phone, whatever the shift. The data flows deterministically onward: shift hours, the night shift, overtime and public holidays automatically feed the Romanian payroll, with an export in SAGA format, without manual re-keying.

The internal assistant Modi is deterministic — with no external LLM — so it cannot “invent” an answer about an employee’s hours or premiums; it answers strictly from the real records. Attendance data is encrypted and accessible only by role, with automatic purging at the end of the legal retention period. Details in the modules and security sections.

For the concrete calculation of hours worked beyond schedule in a shift, you can also use the 2026 overtime calculator.

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Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. The rules and the level of fines may change; always check the text in force at the official source (legislatie.just.ro, the Labour Inspectorate) or consult a specialist before taking decisions.