French working-time rules split employers into two groups, and almost every shift business is in the second one without realising there was a choice.
If everyone in a workshop, service or team works the same posted collective schedule, that schedule is largely the record. Post it, apply it, done.
The moment they do not - different start times, rotating shifts, a rota that changes weekly - Article D3171-8 applies instead, and it asks for something quite different.
What D3171-8 actually asks for
Two things, and the second is the one people miss.
Daily, you record either the start and end times of each period of work, or the number of hours worked. By any means: badge, app, or a written sheet. The article is deliberately unfussy about method.
Weekly, you produce a summary of the hours worked by each employee. Not a total you could calculate if asked - a récapitulatif that exists.
That weekly summary is the most commonly missing piece in businesses that otherwise track their hours perfectly well. The daily data is there, nobody ever consolidated it, and the consolidation is what the text asks for.
How long you keep it
Documents allowing the hours worked by each employee to be accounted for must be kept available to the labour inspectorate for one year under D3171-16.
One year is short by European standards, and it is a trap for a different reason: pay claims run to three years. A record you disposed of at twelve months in perfect compliance with D3171-16 is a record you no longer have when a salary claim arrives two years later, and the burden in that dispute is not going to fall kindly on the party with no evidence. Most advisers suggest three years for exactly this reason. Compliance and self-protection are different deadlines here.
The method is free, the qualities are not
The text does not name a technology, which is genuinely useful. What matters is that the count is reliable, verifiable and not retroactively adjustable.
That last quality is where spreadsheets fail. A file where last Tuesday's hours can be changed with no record of the change is not verifiable in any sense an inspector would accept, and a rota is not a count at all - it shows what you planned, and D3171-8 asks what happened.
Where the exceptions actually apply
D3171-8 does not apply to employees covered by an hours-based forfait agreement that itself sets out how working time is monitored, nor to those under an extended collective agreement fixing working time by objective criteria with its own monitoring rules.
Worth checking your convention collective rather than assuming either way. But note the shape of both exceptions: they exempt you only where another instrument already imposes a monitoring method. Neither is a route to not counting.
A short checklist
- Does anyone in the business not work the posted collective schedule? If yes, D3171-8 is your regime, and it is probably everyone.
- Does a weekly summary per employee exist? Not "could be produced" - exists.
- Can a past day be edited without trace? If yes, that is the reliability problem, not a paperwork one.
- How long do you actually keep it? One year satisfies the inspectorate. Three protects you in a pay dispute.
Your convention collective may be stricter than the Code on all of this, and frequently is. But D3171-8 and D3171-16 are two short articles, and reading them takes less time than the first conversation about them.