Guides

Keeping a record of your own working time is simple in principle and full of small traps in practice. These guides cover the traps. They are written for people paid by the hour, and they apply whether or not you use our app — the method matters more than the tool.

Start with the basics

How to track your working hours

What to record, when to record it, and why a habit that takes fifteen seconds a day beats a perfect system you abandon in six weeks.

Overtime and extra hours

Why overtime should never be merged into your normal hours, how premium rates are usually structured, and how to check the figure on your payslip.

Breaks and unpaid time

Paid versus unpaid breaks, the ten minutes at either end of a shift that nobody records, and how small omissions compound over a year.

Harder schedules

Shift work and rotating schedules

Entering a rota without losing your mind: templates, cycle lengths, night shifts that cross midnight, and the reference-period problem.

Working more than one job

Separating employers cleanly, handling different rates, spotting overlaps, and keeping a combined view of total hours across all of them.

The hour bank and time off in lieu

How time banking works, what usually goes wrong with it, and how to keep a balance you can actually defend in a conversation with your employer.

Making sense of the record

Holidays, sick leave and absence

Why non-working days belong in your tracker, and how to record them so a monthly total still means something.

Reading your work statistics

What each number in a monthly summary is telling you, and the three mistakes that explain most gaps between your record and your payslip.

Checking a payslip against your own record

A repeatable ten-minute routine for reconciling hours, rates and premiums — and what to do when the two disagree.

These guides describe general practice in workplaces that pay by the hour. They are not legal advice, and working-time law differs substantially between countries and between contracts. Where a guide touches on rules, treat it as a prompt to check your own contract and local regulations rather than as a statement of what applies to you.