You finish a tough day at 19:30. The phone buzzes: "Legal daily maximum of 10 hours exceeded." You knew the day ran long, but you didn't expect the labor inspector's number to flash at you from your own pocket. The next thought is not "uh oh." It's "good catch, I would have logged that without realizing."
That's the job of HR warnings in Timesheet. The app already knows your contract, your country's working-time rule, and your breaks. It does the math while you work, and it tells you before a violation lands in your timesheet.
What HR Warnings Actually Detect
Timesheet evaluates three kinds of warnings continuously while you work:
1. Contract Target Warnings
Based on your contract's daily and weekly hours target.
- Daily target approaching: you've worked 80 percent of your contractual hours today
- Daily target exceeded: you passed 100 percent of your daily target
- Weekly target approaching: 80 percent of weekly hours
- Weekly target exceeded: 100 percent of weekly hours
These are level "warning". They are not violations of law; they tell you that you're at or beyond the hours your contract assumes.
2. Legal Maximum Warnings
Based on a Working Time Rule attached to your Employment Model. These are the hard limits the law sets.
- Legal daily maximum approaching: 90 percent of the legal daily cap (e.g. 9 of 10 hours in Germany)
- Legal daily maximum exceeded: the cap is breached
- Legal weekly maximum approaching: 90 percent of the weekly cap
- Legal weekly maximum exceeded: the weekly cap is breached
The "exceeded" warnings are level "critical". The system surfaces them in red and surfaces them loudly.
3. Break Warning
Triggered by your Employment Model's break rules. The classic example, German law, expects a 30-minute break after 6 hours of work and a 45-minute break after 9 hours. Timesheet evaluates the tiered rules against the actual pauses you logged today. If the required break is missing, you see "You need a 30 minute break after 6h of work."
The break check is level "info" because the law allows you to take it later in the day. The warning is a nudge, not a violation, unless you finish the day without taking it.
A Note on Special Populations
The Working Time Rule can also store tighter caps for night workers, youth workers, and pregnant employees. Timesheet does not apply these automatically today: checking them would require personal data (date of birth, pregnancy status) that the app deliberately does not collect. If someone on your team falls into one of these groups, give them their own employment model whose daily and weekly limits reflect the stricter caps.
Why the Math Is Not Just a Sum
Working time for compliance purposes is wall-clock time, not the sum of task durations.
Suppose you tracked two overlapping tasks:
Task A: 09:00 to 12:00 (3h)
Task B: 10:00 to 12:00 (2h)A naive sum says you worked 5 hours. The compliance answer says you worked 3 hours. From 09:00 to 12:00 you were at the desk, no matter how many projects you billed in parallel.
Timesheet merges overlapping time blocks before checking limits. Three hours of overlap shows up as 3 hours toward your legal cap, but the projects still each get their own task with their own start and end time for billing.
The Data Behind the Warnings
Warnings rely on three configured entities in Timesheet:
| Entity | What it carries | Who configures it |
|---|---|---|
| Contract | Daily and weekly target hours, timezone, work-week start day, exempt status, employment model link | HR or admin on Business plans |
| Employment Model | Working time rules and break rules for a role or country | HR or admin |
| Working Time Rule | Hard daily, weekly, and night/youth/pregnant caps, drawn from the country's labor law | HR or admin |
| Break Rule | Tiered break minutes by hours worked, marked paid or unpaid | HR or admin |
Out of the box, Timesheet ships preconfigured Working Time Rules for dozens of countries, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, Spain, France, and the United States (federal). You can override or add custom rules per employment model.
If a user has no active contract in an organization, no warnings fire for that user. If the contract is marked exempt, all warnings are suppressed (the way US-FLSA exempt employees should be treated).
Where the Warnings Show Up
In the App, on the Timer Screen
The timer screen carries a banner above the active task. The banner color matches the warning level:
- Info (cyan on the web, orange on iOS): the break reminder
- Warning (orange): approaching a limit, contractual target exceeded
- Critical (red): legal maximum exceeded
Tap the banner for the full breakdown: which limit, what value today, what the cap is.
As Compliance Notifications
The live banners appear while you use the app. Separately, the backend compliance engine reviews each day after the fact: if a limit was actually breached or a required break was missed, it records the violation and sends a notification. A long Friday afternoon can slip past the banner, but not past the record.
In the Web App
The same banner shows on the web dashboard and in the task form. Managers see warnings for their own time; they do not see warnings for team members on the standard plans.
Setting Warnings Up
Step 1: Create the Contract
- Open Organizations, then your organization, then Contracts on the Business web app
- Click New Contract for the employee (or yourself)
- Set daily hours (e.g., 8), weekly hours (e.g., 40), timezone, week start
- Set exempt status if relevant
- Save
New contracts start as drafts. Activate the contract once it's filled in; it takes effect from its valid-from date.
Step 2: Pick or Create an Employment Model
- Organizations, then your organization, then Employment Models
- Either pick a preset (e.g., Germany, Full-Time, ArbZG) or click New Model
- Attach the Working Time Rule and the Break Rules
- Save and link the model on the contract
If you skip the model, contract-target warnings still fire. Legal max warnings and tiered break checks only appear once a model is linked.
Step 3: Test It
- Start a timer
- Edit a fake entry from earlier today so the day's total is at 80 percent of the daily target
- Watch the banner appear
The first time you see the orange banner with the right number, you know the setup is correct.
Practical Patterns
Use country presets as a starting point. The preconfigured Working Time Rules cover the most common case. Tighten or relax them later, but ship something tonight rather than nothing this quarter.
Mark exempt employees as exempt. US-FLSA exempt employees, executive officers, and other groups that legally fall outside working-time law should be marked exempt on the contract. Otherwise the system surfaces "violations" that are not violations.
Don't fight the overlap rule. If two tasks at 09:00 to 12:00 and 10:00 to 12:00 surprise you with only 3 hours toward the cap, the rule is doing its job. Billing still gets both.
Review violations weekly. Managers can check the rest-period violation log and the audit log under Organizations, then Compliance. The point is to act on patterns before the labor inspector does.
Common Questions
Are warnings law in my country? The warnings are calibrated for several countries, but Timesheet does not certify compliance. The point is to make limits visible. The Working Time Rule is configurable to match exactly what your jurisdiction requires.
Will warnings stop me from working? No. Warnings inform; they do not block. The decision to keep working is yours. The audit trail makes the choice visible later.
Do warnings work offline? On iOS, yes. The app computes warnings on the device from the contract and employment model it has already synced, so they keep updating without a connection. The web app asks the backend, so it needs to be online.
Can I customize the thresholds (80/90/100 percent)? Not at the moment. The thresholds are fixed to keep behavior predictable across teams.
What happens to old data when I change a Working Time Rule? Warnings are evaluated against the rule active at the moment they're computed. Historical compliance reports use the rule that was in force on the day in question. Changing today's rule does not rewrite yesterday's report.
Summary
- HR warnings flag contract targets, legal limits, and missing breaks in real time
- Contractual warnings use your daily and weekly hours; legal warnings use the country's Working Time Rule
- Stricter caps for night, youth, and pregnant workers are handled with a dedicated employment model
- Overlapping tasks count as wall-clock time, not as a sum, for compliance
- Warnings appear in the app and on the web; recorded violations arrive as notifications
- Available on Business plan and up
Where to Go Next
- Set daily and weekly working time targets to wire up the contract side of the warning system
- Track breaks and see your real working hours so the break rule has the data it needs