Less paperwork, more time for your patients

Yes. Since the Federal Labor Court’s (BAG) decision of September 13, 2022 (Case No. 1 ABR 22/21), all employers in Germany are required to systematically record their employees’ working hours. This includes start and end times, duration, and breaks. This also applies to employees at medical practices.

Yes, and that’s exactly what the software is designed for. Your medical staff can track their own work hours using an app, a web browser, or a Chrome extension. Vacation requests are submitted digitally, sick leave is reported, and remaining vacation days can be viewed. All of this happens without any follow-up questions and without involving practice management.

Personizer records all working hours down to the minute, in a legally compliant and traceable manner. Timesheets can be exported and archived at any time to meet legal documentation requirements – including those under the Working Hours Act.

In no time at all, depending on the size of your team. Just create an account, invite your team, and you’re ready to go. Time tracking, vacation scheduling, and employee records are all available right away. The 14-day trial period starts with full functionality.

After 14 days, you have two options: You can either purchase the modules you need, or you can simply continue using Personizer for free indefinitely. Your data will be preserved regardless of which option you choose. There is no automatic transition to a paid subscription and no hidden costs.

Personizer is billed per employee per month, with no base fee or setup costs. You only purchase the modules you need. You can view the prices here.

With Personizer’s export features, you can easily prepare time reports and timesheets for your payroll department or tax advisor. Common formats such as Excel and CSV are supported, eliminating the need for manual data entry. Through the DATEV data service, you can also retrieve the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) directly in Personizer—legally compliant, audit-proof, and without any data discontinuity. Additionally, master data, payroll data, and absences are automatically synchronized between Personizer and DATEV using the payroll import data service.

Yes, and that’s especially important for medical practices. The system contains data requiring special protection, such as absences and working hours. Personizer hosts all data exclusively on ISO-certified servers. Access rights can be controlled in detail on a per-role basis, and no data is shared with third parties. Personizer is a German company based in Lower Saxony.

Since the ruling of the Federal Labor Court on September 13, 2022 (Case No. 1 ABR 22/21), all employers in Germany are required to implement a system for recording all working hours.
For medical practices, this means that the start, end, duration, and breaks must be documented for all employees. This applies to full-time and part-time medical assistants, employed physicians, trainees, mini-jobbers, and cleaning staff. Since the ruling, trust-based working hours without documentation are no longer sufficient. This was also reaffirmed by a ruling of the Hamburg Administrative Court in August 2024.
The consequences of violations are significant: The Working Hours Act provides for fines of up to €30,000 (Section 22 ArbZG). In the case of repeated or intentional violations that endanger the health of employees, there is even the threat of imprisonment for up to one year (Section 23 ArbZG).
In practice, working hours are often not recorded at all, or only on paper and in Excel spreadsheets. The problem: Handwritten timesheets and Excel lists are susceptible to manipulation and often do not stand up to an official audit. At the same time, medical assistants typically work 15 to 30 minutes before the practice opens—preparing treatment rooms, sterilizing instruments, and reviewing initial patient files. Without digital tracking, these hours are systematically lost. A digital time-tracking solution like Personizer records working hours in an audit-proof manner and automatically alerts users to violations of labor laws, such as when the maximum daily working hours of 10 hours are exceeded.

The shortage of medical assistants is one of the biggest challenges facing medical practices in Germany. According to a survey by the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance, 88% of practices rate the availability of medical assistants as poor or very poor. 46% of practices receive not a single application in response to job postings. The Virchowbund warns that without medical assistants, many practices cannot function. Medical assistants and dental assistants are officially classified as shortage occupations.
The reasons for the shortage are structural. Under the current collective wage agreement, medical assistants earn significantly less in their first years on the job than comparable positions in hospitals or at health insurance companies. In those settings, salaries are sometimes more than 50% higher. The result: Many medical assistants leave the field or switch careers entirely.
Practices that want to retain their medical assistants must offer attractive working conditions in addition to competitive pay. Transparent time tracking that fairly documents overtime, digital vacation planning without paperwork, and professional human resources management all signal appreciation. That may sound like soft factors, but it has a tangible impact on employee retention.
Added to this is the complexity of workforce planning: nearly 50% of the approximately 430,000 medical assistants in Germany work part-time. When you factor in trainees who are absent on vocational school days, employed physicians with varying weekly work schedules, and split office hours (e.g., 8 a.m.–12 p.m. and 3 p.m.–6 p.m.), the planning effort becomes so complex that Excel spreadsheets quickly become unmanageable. A digital system provides the overview that practices need for reliable workforce planning.

Employee files in medical practices may contain special categories of personal data as defined in Article 9 of the GDPR, including health records, vaccination records, and, in some cases, information about religious affiliation (relevant for scheduling holidays and work hours). Stricter protection requirements apply to this category of data than to ordinary employee master data.
Among other things, the GDPR requires that access to personal data be limited to the necessary minimum. In practice, this means: Not every medical assistant should be able to view a colleague’s pay stub, and not every practice manager needs access to the cleaning staff’s health records. Paper-based personnel files do not effectively meet this requirement: They are often stored in unlocked cabinets or are accessible to multiple people without a way to track who viewed which file and when.
Added to this are retention periods and deletion obligations. Time sheets must be retained for at least two years (Section 16 ArbZG), and payroll records for six to ten years (Sections 147 AO, 257 HGB). At the same time, data must be actively deleted once these periods have expired. Anyone who manages these retention periods manually with paper files risks either deleting them too early or retaining them for too long—both of which constitute a GDPR violation. Violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (Art. 83 GDPR) can result in fines of up to 20 million euros or 4% of global annual revenue. For a medical practice, such sums could threaten its very existence. A digital personnel file with role-based access rights significantly minimizes this risk.