--- title: "Is Excel good for time tracking?" url: "https://www.gemploy.com/blog/excel-time-tracking" description: "Excel is free and familiar for time tracking, but it has real limits. A practical look at when a spreadsheet still works, and when it starts costing you time." language: en --- small-business # Is Excel good for time tracking? 12 October 2026· By Karina Schulz Wharwood· 4 min read ![Separate time tracking spreadsheets for each employee, with one wrong entry highlighted in red and a clock in front.](https://www.gemploy.com/_astro/54857b9ce8b9ae96.gYA6-Jfn_Ffg60.png) Splurging on HR tools isn't typically high on the priority list, nor is it in the early founder budget when starting a business. This is often why small companies log their employees' working hours and vacations in the simplest and most affordable tool: Excel. ## **How Excel became the default tool** Office software regularly come built into any work laptop. There is nothing extra to buy and nothing to set up. No one needs to create an account, and most people have at least a basic understanding of how to work with it. It is flexible, easy to use for basic tasks, and a legacy tool for any numbers-related work. The user decides how many columns and tabs are needed, and you can grant editing rights to multiple people. It's a simple way to organize timesheets and leave requests without a steep learning curve. ## **When the trusty spreadsheet starts working against you** The limitations tend to show up later. At month's end, someone has to send the tax advisor an overview of attendance and absences so payroll can run. That is when a total suddenly looks wrong, and nobody can find the original entry. A wrong date, a missing row, or a total that was never updated slips in easily and goes unnoticed, because the sheet trusts whoever and whatever gets typed into it. In practice, there is also rarely a single file for everyone. Usually each person keeps their own sheet, and someone has to collect them at month's end and merge them. Anyone who hasn't entered their hours is only spotted late, and reminders have to be sent by hand. If you try to automate that, you quickly end up writing your own macros and building your own HR software. It gets tedious for the tax advisor too, because instead of one clean export, they receive many separate files. Then there are the versions. Between changes, emails, edits, and renaming, it can become hard to know which is the "\_latest.xlsx" version. None of this makes Excel a bad tool. It was just never meant to be an HR tool for more than a couple of people. ## **So, when does Excel still make sense?** As a rough guide, you can assume a spreadsheet is usually fine for one to three people at a single location, with a dedicated person who has the time to maintain it every month. The strain comes once there are more employees, maybe even multiple locations, and once approvals or a manager's overview are needed. Especially if people management isn't your primary role, it can become overwhelming and hard to keep everything in order. ## **Why this matters** Since a 2022 ruling by Germany's Federal Labour Court, employers are required to record the start, end, and break times of every employee's working day, not just the daily total. There's no dedicated law for this yet, just a draft that's been under discussion for a while. So far, nothing carves out an exception for small businesses. Excel can technically satisfy this if every entry is complete, dated, and archive-ready. In practice, that last part is where it struggles. There's no proof of who entered what, or when, and no protection against a cell being changed after the fact. If you are unsure whether your current setup holds up, please check with a tax advisor or employment lawyer. This isn't legal advice, and the legal situation may have changed since this article was written in October, 2026. ## **Where Gemploy fits in** Gemploy was built to help those in smaller businesses who want a more centralized approach to their time tracking. It allows companies as small as a two-person team to track their hours, absences, and keep their records in one place. Every entry is dated, meaning that when you pass it on to payroll, there is no scrambling to make sure you have the latest file or correct working hours. It’s free for teams of up to 9 people, then 5 € (not incl. VAT) per employee per month. This means you can bring structure into your team before it gets complicated and grow with the tool. Try Gemploy Personnel records, time tracking and absences in one tool. [See pricing](https://www.gemploy.com/pricing)