A practical guide to digital time tracking in networks with many work points: QR/NFC kiosk, central records per location, leave, shift planning and the REGES link.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
A network of shops, restaurants or service points does not have one time-tracking problem — it has a time-tracking problem multiplied by the number of locations. What works at a single site quickly becomes unmanageable across ten, twenty or fifty work points, each with its own schedule and its own staff.
This guide goes through the challenges of a distributed workforce and what digitising time tracking at scale means in concrete terms.
In retail, HoReCa or services with many work points, working time records run into a few structural problems, not merely into carelessness:
The result is a stressful monthly payroll cycle, with hours lost reconciling data instead of taking business decisions.
The answer is not to replace a paper notebook with a slightly better organised Excel file, but to move the actual clocking in into a digital system, at every location, which automatically feeds a single database.
In practice, that means:
For field teams that do not work from a fixed point (deliveries, call-outs, maintenance), clocking in can also be done from the mobile app, with the same centralisation into the shared pool of data.
In a network with extended opening hours — retail open into the evening, HoReCa with night shifts, services covering weekends — calculating premiums by hand quickly becomes unsustainable. Each location may have a different schedule, and whoever calculates by hand risks missing hours that should be compensated with a night, weekend or public holiday premium.
A digital time-tracking system, linked directly to payroll, applies the rules automatically: hours in the night interval receive the corresponding premium, weekend or public holiday work is identified automatically, and overtime is calculated from the real difference between the normal schedule and the hours actually recorded — not from estimates. That removes one of the most frequent sources of error in the payroll of a network whose schedules differ from one location to another.
When leave requests travel by email or in messaging groups, it is easy for an approval not to reach the person compiling the timesheet in time, especially if the location manager and central HR are different people. A digital flow solves this with a clear path: the employee requests from the app, the location manager approves or rejects, and the decision is reflected automatically in the attendance calendar and, at the end of the month, in the timesheet.
The same goes for shifts: a network frequently needs to move people from one location to another — a shop is left uncovered, a restaurant needs reinforcement on a busy weekend. Without an overall view, these decisions are taken over the phone, at the last minute. Shift planning with visibility across all locations at once makes it possible to spot gaps quickly and reallocate staff in good time, and the planned shifts link directly to the actual time records.
A network with many locations also handles a large volume of personnel documents — individual employment contracts (contract individual de muncă, CIM), addenda (acte adiționale) and job descriptions. Kept on paper, at each work point, they are hard to find quickly and hard to keep up to date. A central digital repository, with controlled access, keeps all of each employee’s documents in one place, easy to search.
The same data also feeds the obligation attached to REGES (Registrul General de Evidență a Salariaților, the General Register of Employee Records): every hiring, salary change, suspension or termination must be reported there. For a network with frequent staff movement across several locations, handling these submissions manually increases the risk of delays or omissions. With centralised data, the information REGES needs is already structured and up to date.
The impact shows up first of all qualitatively, in the daily workflow: the administrative time spent collecting and re-keying hours falls, because the data comes in digital from the outset; the end-of-month reconciliation becomes shorter, because the time records, the leave and the premiums are already calculated correctly rather than gathered from scattered sources; and central management’s visibility over attendance at each location improves, which helps cover decisions to be taken in good time rather than in a crisis.
We are not offering percentages or figures here — the impact varies from one network to another, depending on the number of locations and how fragmented the process was before. What stays constant is the direction: less manual work, more real-time visibility.
Workly covers precisely this pattern of a distributed network. Each location can have its own kiosk with a rotating QR code and NFC card, and all clock-ins are centralised automatically, in real time, in a single system — no papers to collect and no manual re-keying into payroll. Shift planning is done with visibility across all locations at once, so you can spot cover gaps quickly and reallocate staff in good time.
Once centralised, the time records feed directly into the payroll module for Romania, with night, weekend and public holiday hours already separated — the night premium is calculated automatically, the rest is handled as an adjustment — plus an export to SAGA. The personnel data needed for REGES sits structured in the same system, up to date, however many locations the staff movement comes from.
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, REGES, ITM) or consult a specialist.
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