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What must be in it
The record itself covers the hours and the money:
- the days the employee worked and the number of hours worked on each of those days
- the hours worked in each pay period
- the wages paid, and how they were calculated
Alongside it you must keep the employment details: name and postal address, age if under 20, start date, whether they are full-time, part-time or casual, the kind of work, a copy of the employment agreement, and any wage deductions with the agreement to them.
Separately, the Holidays Act 2003 requires a holiday and leave record — leave taken, leave owing and the payments made for it. The two are often kept together, but they are two statutory obligations, not one.
Six years, and producible
Both records must be kept for at least six years, even after the employee has left, and must be available to the employee, their union and a Labour Inspector on request. They can be on paper or electronic, provided the information can be accessed easily and converted to written form.
This is a firmer duty than in Australia or the United Kingdom, where the obligation to track hours is inferred from minimum wage and working time rules rather than named in statute. Here it is named, and so is the period.
What happens if you cannot produce it
Section 132 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 deals with failure to keep or produce records, and it is the reason the obligation has teeth: where the employer cannot produce the record, the Employment Relations Authority may accept as proved the claims the employee makes about their hours.
In practice that inverts the argument. Without a record you are not disputing the employee's figures from a position of evidence — theirs is the account on the table. Capturing hours as they happen with time and attendance produces the record as a by-product; our free timesheet templates do the same job on paper.
