Electronic staff register under Swedish Tax Agency rules

One recording is enough

A staff register and a time report hold almost the same details. Who was present, when the shift started and when it ended. What separates them is what they are used for: one goes to payroll, the other has to be readable by an inspector standing in the room.

Kept separately, every shift is recorded twice, and the two start to drift apart. In Timply one recording is enough. The employee clocks in on the app or a terminal, and that entry is then used for both.

What to do during an inspection

The inspection is unannounced. The Swedish Tax Agency arrives, asks for the register and reads it on the spot.

You log in and open the register for the premises. There you see who is clocked in at that moment, and the shifts before it with names, identity details and times. If somebody has forgotten to clock out, the shift stays open, and the inspector sees it as open too. Worth a look through beforehand, and the correction is made afterwards.

The register is opened by a signed-in administrator. The law assumes somebody present who can produce it, so make sure whoever is responsible at the premises has an account and can sign in.

Identity numbers handled as identity numbers

The law requires an identity detail per person, and for Swedish employees that is the personal identity number. It is sensitive data and is treated as such.

Identity numbers are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage and read out only where the register requires it. An administrator with no identity detail of their own cannot change or delete a register entry, because the reporting requires both the name and the identity detail of whoever made the change.

Changes and deletions are written to a log that cannot be edited or erased, and that survives the removal of the entry it describes.

Construction has its own rules and its own file

Construction falls under the same law but reports its own way. The register for a building site goes to the Swedish Tax Agency as an XML file in their format, and Timply writes that file. It is validated against the Tax Agency's own schema before you download it, so what comes out is either valid or nothing at all.

The site needs its building site ID, the one that looks like PL1504AA00016 and is issued when the site is registered. If anybody in the period has no identity number the export will not run, and Timply names them rather than handing over a file with holes in it. Shifts that are still open are included and stop nothing.

For the five other sectors the law requires no file at all. There the register on screen is the requirement, and the export is a CSV that opens in Excel.

Timply does not support ID06, which is used for identification and attendance on larger building sites. If you work for clients who require ID06, you need that system alongside Timply.

What Timply does for construction today is on the construction and installation page.

Three things you declare yourself

Which sector the premises belongs to, whether the family-business exemption applies, and whether the premises has mixed activity with less than 75 per cent falling inside the requirement. Timply calculates none of them.

Those judgements belong to you and your accountant, and what you declare is visible in the settings for the premises.