Recently, a client from Spain came to us with a question that got us thinking. He was already tracking time with WebWork, already compliant with the daily record every Spanish company has kept since 2019, and could show an inspector exactly when each person started and finished on any given day. What he could not tell us was whether his team was on course to pass the 1,800 annual hours his convenio sets. That was the number he was actually being held to.
He needed to know, in September, whether his team was on course to pass it.
So we built him the report. The reason it took building, rather than a filter on an existing export, is written into two different articles of the Workers’ Statute that we’ll go through below.
The Daily Record and the Annual Quota Are Two Different Obligations
Article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute, added by Royal Decree-Law 8/2019, requires every company to record each worker’s daily start and end times. Records are kept for four years and made available to inspectors, worker representatives and the workers themselves. That obligation has been in force for seven years and it is unambiguous.
The limit that creates overtime comes from somewhere else. Article 34.1 sets the duration of the working day by collective agreement or contract, with the 40-hour weekly maximum calculated as an annual average. The actual number is whatever the sector or company convenio says it is.
You cannot read that number off a single day. For example, a worker can finish at seven every evening for a month and still be under quota for the year. Another can leave on time every day and pass it in November because of how the calendar fell. That’s why the only way to know is to accumulate the year and compare it against the quota.
What the Report Has to Contain
Once we started building the report, more requirements started surfacing. But we still managed to build for every one of them:
- Hours per worker, per reference period, as the convenio defines it.
- A configurable annual quota, because the figure varies by convenio, by sector and sometimes by individual workers.
- Pro-rating for part-time workers and anyone who joined mid-year.
- Deductions for holidays, leave and public holidays, which reduce the ordinary hours owed.
- A running balance of hours to date against the pro-rated quota, plus a projected year-end position.
- Excess over quota flagged as payable overtime.
- A cross-check against the 80-hour annual overtime cap in Article 35.2.
- An export he could hand to an inspector as evidence.
Point 2 is the one that makes this hard to buy off the shelf. There is no single Spanish annual quota to hard-code so a construction convenio and a hospitality convenio set different figures, and a company agreement can set a different one again.
Compensated Rest and Irregular Hours Change the Calculation
Two provisions in Spanish law change how the total is counted, and both of them work in the company’s favour.
The first is about how you settle overtime. If you compensate it with rest rather than pay, and the rest is taken within four months, those hours do not count toward the 80-hour annual cap.
The second is about how you distribute the year. The Workers’ Statute permits irregular distribution of the working day, so a heavy month followed by a lighter one can stay within the ordinary quota. A report that treats every busy week as overtime will overstate what the company owes.
Both mean the running total has to apply the convenio’s rules, not just add up hours.
Why We Are Turning This Into a Standard Feature
We built this for one customer. But now we are working on making it available to everyone, because he is not the only company in Spain with this problem. Every Spanish employer covered by a convenio has an annual quota, and most of them are calculating it in a spreadsheet next to their time tracking tool.
In fact, it’s not just Spain. France, Germany, Portugal and Italy all have working-time record rules of their own. That’s why we’re building the annual computation as a proper part of the product.
This is how we work—by listening to you
This feature exists because a customer asked for it and explained his problem better than we could have guessed at it. We would rather hear the requirement from you than guess at it.
So if you are managing working time in another country and your quota is calculated differently, let us know about it. Every requirement we hear helps shape the product for everyone who uses it.
If you are actively evaluating tools for a Spanish team, a live demo is worth twenty minutes. Our team can walk you through how the hours data feeds reporting and payroll before you commit to anything.
