Most advice about working-time records leads with the fine. The fine is not the expensive part.
Section 25 of the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 requires you to keep records showing whether the Act is being complied with, and to keep them for at least three years. Failing to do that without reasonable cause is an offence. Fine.
The part worth your attention is what comes next in the same section. Where an employer has failed to keep those records, the onus of proving that the Act was complied with lies on the employer in proceedings before an adjudication officer or the Labour Court.
Read that again from the other side. An employee claims they worked eleven days without a rest day, or never got the breaks they were entitled to. Normally they would have to make that case. If you have no records, you have to disprove it - and you have to do it without the one thing that would have settled the argument.
That is the real cost, and no fine comes close to it.
What you actually have to keep
For each employee: the days and hours worked in each week, the start and finish times, and the leave granted. That is it. It is less than most people assume, and the gap is almost never "we did not know what to record". It is that nobody kept it consistently, or nobody could find it three years later.
Two details catch people out.
The records live where the work happens. The Act says the records are kept at the premises where the employee works, or where their work is principally directed from. For a single site that is trivial. For three sites and a payroll bureau, it is worth checking that "the accountant has them somewhere" is actually true.
Three years runs from when the record was made, not from when the employee left, not from the end of the tax year. A rolling three years, per record.
Form OWT1, and when you do not need it
If you have no clocking facility, the Organisation of Working Time (Records) Regulations 2001 prescribe a form - OWT1 - for recording days and hours worked each week, or a form substantially to like effect.
"Substantially to like effect" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is the useful part. If you have a clock-in system that captures start and finish times per person per day, you are not obliged to keep a parallel paper form as well. OWT1 exists so that an employer without a clocking system still has a defined thing to produce. It is a floor, not a target.
Where employers go wrong is having neither: no clocking system, and no OWT1 either, because the rota was treated as the record. A published rota shows what you intended. It does not show what happened, and the difference between those two is the entire subject of any claim.
The test your records have to pass
Whatever you use, the question an adjudicator is effectively asking is whether the record is worth believing. Three things decide that.
- It reflects hours actually worked, not hours scheduled. If your record is the rota, you do not have a record.
- Each entry belongs to an identified person. Shared logins and a communal sheet on the wall both fail this.
- Yesterday cannot be silently changed. Corrections are fine and normal, but the original entry and who changed it have to survive. A spreadsheet where a manager can quietly move a clock-out from 18:40 to 17:00 has no evidential value at all, and it is worth being honest that this is the most common setup in small businesses.
Paper is not the problem, incidentally. A properly kept paper record beats an editable spreadsheet. The question is never whether it is digital.
What an inspection actually feels like
A WRC inspector asks for records for named employees over a period. The realistic failure is not refusing - it is taking a fortnight to assemble something from three sources, at which point the gaps are obvious to everyone including you.
So the useful test is not "do we have records". It is: someone asks for one employee's last three months, right now. How long does it take? If the honest answer is measured in days, that is your gap, and it is the same gap that would hurt you in a claim.
The order to do this in
- Time that request. Pick an employee, pull their last three months. Whatever that takes is your real position.
- Check you are recording actual hours, not the rota. This is the one that quietly invalidates everything else.
- Check three years back. Not that you have a policy saying three years - that the records from three years ago are actually retrievable.
- Then worry about the format. OWT1 if you have no clocking system, your clocking records if you do. This is the easiest of the four and it is where most people start.
The Act is public and readable - section 25 is a few paragraphs. If you only read one part of one statute this year, that is a reasonable candidate, because it is the part that decides who has to prove what.