Time tracking software for SMEs: six questions, 21 providers

The duty has existed since 13 September 2022. On that day the Federal Labour Court ruled (order 1 ABR 22/21) that employers have to introduce a system for recording working time, derived from section 3(2) no. 1 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, following the judgment of the European Court of Justice of 14 May 2019 (C-55/18).

• Project time tools such as awork, Clockify and Toggl Track count hours against tasks but check no maximum working time, no rest period and no break requirement.
• At Ordio, legally compliant time recording starts only with the Plus package; the Starter package does not include it.
• At Shiftbase the basic legal check sits in the Enterprise package, and the full check for breaches costs 0.50 euros per person per month as an add-on.

The entry price on the home page is rarely the price the business pays. Five patterns keep recurring in the market, and all five push the figure up.

• Module pricing: Crewmeister charges for time recording, the leave planner, the shift planner and the DATEV connection separately. TimeTac and ZEP likewise.
• Base fees: TimeTac 19.50 euros a month per company, HRworks 60 to 300 euros, Planday 25 euros from the Plus plan, clockin 10 euros with fewer than five users.
• Mandatory support: Papershift includes basic support at 39 euros a month as a compulsory part of every package, with a one-year term.
• One-off fees: Kenjo from 400 euros for setup and 600 euros for the DATEV connection, MEP24 249 to 999 euros activation, HRworks 1,550 to 4,480 euros setup, Shiftbase 150 to 575 euros for guided onboarding.
• Terms: the price quoted often applies only with annual or two-yearly payment. At clockin the monthly price is 10 % above the 24-month price, at Ordio 16 % above the annual price.

The server location and the operator are two different questions, and in the market they regularly get collapsed into one. A data centre in Germany does not remove the data from US law: providers with a US parent are subject to the CLOUD Act and to surveillance powers under FISA 702, regardless of where the servers stand.

• Germany, German operator: MetronHR (Hetzner Online GmbH, Nuremberg and Falkenstein).
• Germany, US operator: Crewmeister (Amazon Web Services, Frankfurt am Main), awork (Microsoft servers in Germany), Clockodo (Microsoft Azure, Frankfurt and Berlin).
• Germany, operator not named: Timebutler (data centre near Frankfurt), timr (servers in Germany, ISO 27001), ZEP (several German data centres), TimeTac (main servers in Germany, further ones in the EU).
• EU with no country named: Papershift ("EU hosting"), Factorial ("in the EU"), Shiftbase ("European servers"), Personio (AWS in the EU).
• Outside Germany or not named at all: Planday (Microsoft Azure via the Irish Microsoft entity), Sage (SageID via AWS Dublin, system administration via Azure Dublin), HRworks (AWS Dublin), Kenjo ("ISO 27001 certified servers", no country), askDANTE ("our servers, in a data centre"), Clockify (predominantly the USA).

Where payroll is done outside the business, what decides it is not whether software can produce files. They all can. What decides it is the state the figures arrive in at the tax practice. Raw clocking times have to be turned there into target hours, a balance and premium categories, and that work is billed by effort.

• The payroll handover is not always in the base price: at Crewmeister the DATEV connection is an add-on from 0.60 euros per user and month, at TimeTac the two DATEV data services cost 0.99 and 0.49 euros per person and month, at Kenjo the setup costs 600 euros once, and at Ordio the export comes only with the Pro package (169 euros per location and month).
• Sage runs payroll itself rather than handing it over; the payroll module costs from 39 euros a month.
• At MetronHR the DATEV payroll export and the monthly summary are part of both plans, Team and Professional, at no extra cost. The change history of time entries is in Professional.

In trades, care, catering and retail the majority do not work at a computer. What decides it then is how people clock: with an app on their own phone, at a tablet on the wall, or at permanently installed hardware with a badge.

Time recording is the occasion but rarely the whole need. As soon as a business hires, contracts, leave entitlements, documents with expiry dates and the joining process come with it. Anyone keeping those subjects alongside in folders and spreadsheets maintains master data twice.

• All 23 providers with prices and sources
• What MetronHR costs

Four patterns emerge from the six questions in which the answer is the same. Where a different need is to the fore, the last row leads to the individual comparisons, in which every third-party figure carries its source and the date it was retrieved.

• All individual comparisons with prices and sources
• What MetronHR costs