Portugal's rule on working-time records is short, and two details in it decide whether you comply.
Article 202 of the Código do Trabalho requires an employer to keep a record of working time for every employee, including those exempt from fixed hours, showing the start and end of work and any interruptions or intervals not counted as working time, so that the hours worked can be calculated per day and per week.
It applies regardless of contract type, company size or sector. There is no small-employer exemption.
The two details that decide it
Interruptions, not just start and end. The record has to distinguish the breaks that are not working time. A pair of timestamps at each end of the day does not do this, and the difference is not academic: without it, everything between the first and last stamp reads as working time, which is a claim you may not want to be making about a ten-hour span with a two-hour break in the middle.
A place that allows immediate consultation. This is the phrase that catches people. The record must be kept accessible, in a way that permits it to be consulted straight away. Not retrieved from an archive. Not requested from the accountant and sent on Monday. The Working Conditions Authority can audit these records at any time, and the standard the text sets is immediacy.
If your records live in a spreadsheet on one manager's laptop, or in a folder at head office while the inspection is happening in the restaurant, you have a compliance problem that has nothing to do with the quality of the data.
Five years
Records are kept for five years - among the longest in Europe, and worth designing for rather than discovering. Five years of daily records for every employee is a volume that rewards deciding early where it lives and how you would produce one person's month from three years ago.
Two practical consequences. First, whatever you use has to still be readable in five years, which is an argument against a format tied to one piece of software or one person's account. Second, under the GDPR you should not be keeping more than the obligation requires either - five years is a ceiling as much as a floor.
Employees exempt from fixed hours are still recorded
Isenção de horário de trabalho is frequently misread as an exemption from recording. It is not. The employee is exempt from a fixed schedule; the employer is not exempt from the record. Article 202 says so directly, and it is the most common gap in businesses that otherwise do this well - the managers are the ones with no record.
A short checklist
- Do your records show interruptions, or only the two ends of the day?
- Could someone standing in the workplace produce them now? That is the standard the text sets.
- Can you retrieve five years back, by employee?
- Are your exempt-schedule staff in the record? They should be.
Article 202 is a page long, and reading it directly is genuinely faster than reading about it.