Is automatic time tracking really BOKraft-compliant?

Yes. If the tracking cannot be manipulated and the driver can see their hours at any time. Both are required by the 2019 ECJ ruling and the German transposition. Fahrly saves every change with timestamp and user. For every inspection, you export a PDF.

What changes for my tax office?

The raw data comes as a DATEV file. Not as an Excel attachment with questions anymore. That saves your tax office about one hour per month. And because they usually bill hourly, you save on the invoice too.

Automatic timesheets: how rental car bosses save five hours per week

Q: How long does the switch from Excel to digital timesheets take?

For a business with 5 to 15 drivers: two hours of setup. And one week of parallel work. In that week, Excel and Fahrly run side by side. From the second week, you do not need the Excel sheet anymore.

The Friday evening every rental car boss knows

It is 6 pm on Friday. The last drivers are still out on the road. On the desk sit five paper notes. Three printed Uber reports. Two Bolt screenshots. And the WhatsApp chats about shift swaps.

At 10 pm you are still adding hours. Monday, the tax office calls. They ask why Yusuf's Sunday hours are missing. Tuesday, you fix two Excel sheets. A driver complains because his breaks were subtracted wrong.

Next Friday, it starts all over again.

If that sounds like your weekend, you are not alone. We have talked to more than 200 rental car bosses in the last two years. The number is almost always the same: five hours per week on timesheets and payroll. That is 250 hours per year. At an owner rate of 60 €, that is 15,000 € in time. Time you are not on the road. Not with customers. Not in the workshop.

Why Excel does not work for rental cars

The reason is structural. Your drivers do not have a fixed punch clock. They drive when and where demand shows up. The important data does not live in your office. It lives in the Uber and Bolt apps.

And the rules are strict. Stricter than in almost any other industry: Arbeitszeitgesetz (ArbZG, the working time law) and Fahrpersonalgesetz (the law for driving personnel). And BOKraft looks closely.

Anyone trying to do this with Excel makes three mistakes:

Everything twice. Trips are in Uber. And then again in your Excel sheet. Every copy is a chance for mistakes.
No warnings. Excel does not track when a driver goes over the maximum hours. You only notice it when BOKraft notices.
No audit trail. A cell reads differently on Monday than on Friday. Who changed what when? Nobody knows. For BOKraft, that is a real problem.

What "automatic" really means

Automatic timesheets do not mean: a nicer Excel template. They mean: the hours come directly from the source. From where they already exist.

Fahrly reads your drivers' trips directly from Uber and Bolt. Standby time, breaks, and shift changes come from the shift plan. Rest periods under § 4 ArbZG and maximum hours under Fahrpersonalgesetz are included.

For every driver and every week you see: the real hours, whether everything fits, and warnings — before they become fines.

At month-end, Fahrly does the payroll in one click. Base hours. Night and Sunday premiums. Expenses. Tip allocations. All following rules you set once.

You check the preview in five minutes. Fix one edge case if needed. Export the DATEV file (that is the format for your tax office). Your tax office reads it in directly.

What changes in numbers

Friday evening goes from five hours to zero. At month-end you need 45 minutes for the check instead of a full day of Excel. Your tax office bills less time. For seven drivers, that is 40 to 80 € less on the invoice per month.

And at the next BOKraft inspection you are done in 25 minutes. Everything is logged. Everything can be exported. No follow-up questions.

What you no longer risk

Violations of the working time law or the driving personnel law cost four figures per case. And repeat violations can go all the way to losing your Konzession.

Most cases are not on purpose. They are simply blind spots: a driver takes on too many double shifts because nobody is counting. With automatic time tracking, you see the warning before the week is even over.

Which businesses this pays off for

From the first employed driver on. Really. Five hours per week is five hours. Whether you have one driver or twenty. The effort does not grow linearly. But the chance of mistakes grows fast.

And fines for badly logged working time hurt a small business as much as a big one. Solo drivers without staff do not need this module. A clean ride archive from FahrlyGo is enough for them.

The switch takes one week

Two hours of setup. One week of parallel work. In that week, Excel and Fahrly run side by side. You see: Fahrly counts the same. Or Fahrly finds mistakes Excel missed. From the second week, you do not need the Excel sheet anymore.

After that: no more Friday evenings in the office. No tax office asking questions. No driver complaining about wrong breaks. No fine that came out of nowhere.