Precision Timekeeping: Best Protection Against Business Damnation

Our new year’s message to management: please focus on the fine details of workforce time and pay documentation.  Like a speeding ticket to the lifetime freeway driver, it is only a matter of time before an unmindful employer gets flagged with a mass litigation suit, possibly placing millions at stake for technical Labor Code violations. Workplace Roulette – Reducing the Odds of PAGA Purgatory (December 13, 2024)

Precise timekeeping is the foundation for limiting the chances of such disasters.  California requires every employer:

●  to keep payroll records showing hours worked daily and wages paid for each employee, including time out and in for meal breaks (e.g., Wage Order 4, section 7), and to preserve those records for at least three years (Labor Code section 1174(d)); and

●  to issue itemized wage statements, for hourly workers to contain, among other things, the exact total hours worked and all applicable hourly rates and exact corresponding hours (Labor Code  226).

Where an employer fails to keep required records, an employee’s testimony regarding hours worked is presumed accurate, shifting the burden to the employer to disprove it. Hernandez v. Mendoza 199 Cal.App.3d 721 (1988).

For decades, a company using old school manual cards could reply with its fair and neutral “rounding” practices, setting the work start or end forward or back to the nearest tenth or even quarter hour.  The days of that defense may be numbered. In 2021, the California Supreme Court called such practices into question “given that advances in technology have enabled employers to more easily and more precisely capture time worked by employees.”  Donohue v. AMN Services, LLC  11 Cal.5th 58 (2021).

While we cannot endorse any particular digital system, there is a wealth of resources for management’s move to join this trend.  See, e.g., The 9 Best Payroll and Timekeeping Software in 2026 (December 31, 2025).

Take-Away:

A best practice to build protections against crippling mass wage-and-hour litigation is to move as quickly as possible from a traditional manual method to workable digital timekeeping software and protocols to ensure all hourly employees are on board with the change.

For further information, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin

See also:

• Old School is Punching Out – Deter Class Action Challenges by Digital Timekeeping(April 18, 2025)
• Munched for Lunch – No Break for Paying Employee’s Meal Times (September 20, 2024)
• Timekeeping Policy – Fourth Dimension Attention: It’s in the Cards (February 24, 2023)
• Brinker Clocking in on Employee Timekeeping (May 12, 2012)

Tim Bowles
January 2, 2026