A company ended up paying for 928 overtime hours because its time records contained cross-outs

Bringing time sheets to court does not guarantee that a judge will accept them as reliable evidence.

That is what the High Court of Justice of Catalonia has just reminded employers in STSJ CAT 1546/2026, dated March 9, 2026. The company did submit records, but the court did not treat them as valid support: they were loose sheets, partly filled in by hand, with cross-outs and corrections, and without minimum safeguards of reliability and integrity.

The court upheld the order to pay €12,433.60 for 928 overtime hours, plus 10% late-payment interest. In the court’s view, those records did not make it possible to reconstruct the employee’s actual working time reliably.

In overtime litigation, a time record only helps if the company can explain where each entry came from, who made any correction that was needed, and what trace each change left behind. Once the employer’s document loses consistency, the judge stops treating it as a solid foundation and starts giving more weight to the surrounding evidence.

How the records fell apart in court

The company submitted signed sheets, rota schedules and a recognisable system. The problem appeared when the court looked at the detail.

The judgment describes a record kept on loose sheets showing start time, end time, ordinary hours, monthly total and the employee’s signature. The sheets showed exact 8-hour working days, split very mechanically between morning and afternoon, even where the entries themselves did not add up. On top of that, there were cross-outs and handwritten corrections, as well as changes in handwriting from some months to others.

That combination does not automatically invalidate every manual record, but it does seriously weaken its evidential value when the company cannot explain who made each correction, when it was made and why the final result should still be considered reliable.

Which factors carried more weight than the sheets

The employee maintained that he regularly worked 12-hour days. The judgment describes a repeated pattern: if he clocked in at 09:00, he finished at 21:00; if he started at 07:00, he finished at 19:00; and on the night shift, from 20:00 to 08:00.

The company had also paid amounts described as “presence hours” or “availability hours”, but those payments were not identified on the payslips as overtime. That point did not determine the claim by itself, but it did not help the company rebut it either.

In this type of case, the time record is not assessed in isolation. If the employer’s main evidence loses credibility, the employee’s account is no longer weighed against a strong document and instead is assessed against the broader context: repeated schedules, ambiguous payments and the overall consistency of the narrative.

A system may cause no issues in a labour inspection and still become much harder to defend in court. At that stage, what matters are the questions about each entry, each correction and the full traceability of the record.

Why this case points in the same direction as the new regulation

Spain’s new digital time tracking regulation is still awaiting final approval. Even so, the draft insists on an idea that was already present in this dispute: systems that are objective, reliable and accessible, with traceability and protection against alteration.

The ruling does not apply that future text, but it does highlight the same evidential problem. If the record does not preserve enough integrity to function as evidence, its formal appearance carries less weight than the real ability to reconstruct what happened and who intervened in each change.

If you still use paper sheets or Excel, review it as if litigation were tomorrow

If your company still relies on manual sheets, editable spreadsheets or records that a manager can alter without leaving a clear trace, the key question is whether you could defend them tomorrow without reconstructing the story after the fact.

Start by reviewing whether clock-ins are recorded in real time, who can correct them and whether every change leaves a trace. From there, also look at what history you retain when you export reports or retrieve earlier months, and how you would explain all of that in an inspection or in court.

The real problem begins when the cross-outs and corrections can no longer be justified.

We have explained that issue in more detail in our article on how the burden of proof changes when there is a digital time record versus no record at all and what a company should require from time tracking software.

Before the problem becomes a lawsuit

STSJ CAT 1546/2026 points to something simpler: if the record contains cross-outs or uncontrolled changes, its value as evidence drops.

If you still rely on paper sheets or Excel today, it makes more sense to review now how that evidence is created, corrected and preserved than to try to explain it once a claim is already on the table. If you want a practical reference point, you can look at our features or try Cleverfy free for 14 days.

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Sources: judgment STSJ CAT 1546/2026 (ECLI:ES:TSJCAT:2026:1546), available through CENDOJ.

Legal note: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.