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The Arbeitsgesetz governs how long people may work and what rest they are owed. Three of its rules are checked automatically against recorded time.

Art. 9 — Maximum weekly hours

The platform holds an industry category on each employee record — INDUSTRIAL, NON_INDUSTRIAL or OTHER, defaulting to OTHER — and applies 45 hours to the first and 50 to the other two. Nobody chooses the limit week by week. It sits on the employee rather than on the employer because the ArG’s categories follow the work being done: an organization can employ people in more than one category, and a category set once on the record then applies to every week that person works. The weekly check reports the total, the applicable maximum, and the excess.

Art. 15 — Mandatory breaks

Breaks scale with the length of the working day: The check runs per day over the recorded work blocks and reports the shortfall, so the correction is unambiguous. This is why time is recorded as blocks with breaks rather than as a bare daily total — the rule is about the shape of the day.
A break counts only if the employee is genuinely free of duty. A “break” spent supervising is working time. The platform records what you tell it; classifying the time correctly is a management responsibility.

Art. 12 — Annual overtime cap

Tracked as a running annual total with the remaining allowance shown, so the cap is visible while there is still time to act on it.

How violations surface

Each check returns a verdict with a severity: Each carries a message identifying which rule applies, and appears on the employee’s week, on the manager’s team view, and in the compliance report.

What the platform does not decide for you

The ArG’s category definitions are not a simple lookup from a business sector. Set it deliberately.
Permit requirements and supplements are outside the automatic checks. Record the time; the permits and premia remain a management responsibility.
Certain senior functions are excluded from the working-time provisions. The platform will still record and check their time — configure or ignore accordingly.
A collective agreement may impose lower maxima or longer breaks. Where it does, configure the stricter limit; the statutory check is a floor, not a ceiling.

Annualised working time

Where hours are budgeted over a year (Jahresarbeitszeit) — common in schools — the annual target is tracked alongside the weekly ArG maxima, which still apply to each individual week. An annual budget does not license a 60-hour week.

How time is recorded

Work blocks, schedules, Soll hours and the compliance surface.