Get time tracking nailed down

Yes, the automatic break deduction feature allows breaks to be entered automatically. A break is automatically deducted if the recorded break time does not meet the specified requirements.

No, Personizer is designed to be so simple that all employees can start using it right away without any prior knowledge – whether in the office or on the construction site.

Yes, time labels allow you to assign working hours to specific projects or tasks and then analyze them.

All recorded times and absences can be easily exported—ideal for sharing with your tax advisor or for expense reporting.

No. Personizer can be used directly in your browser. Alternatively, the app is available for download on iOS and Android.

The skilled trades sector in Germany employs around 5.6 million people across more than 1 million businesses—many of them in small teams with a mix of employment types: journeymen and journeywomen, apprentices, part-time workers, and seasonal workers. Since the Federal Labor Court (BAG) ruling of September 13, 2022 (Case No. 1 ABR 22/21), all employers are required to systematically record the start, end, and duration of the daily working hours of all employees—regardless of industry or company size.
For skilled trades businesses, there is an additional challenge: work is rarely done at a desk. Technicians, electricians, and construction crews are on the go all day. Handwritten timesheets that arrive at the office at the end of the week are prone to errors, difficult to verify, and legally risky.
Added to this is the MiLoG documentation requirement under Section 17 of the Minimum Wage Act: For mini-jobbers and marginal employees, working hours must be recorded within 7 calendar days and retained for 2 years. Violations are punishable by fines of up to €30,000. Customs authorities regularly conduct unannounced inspections in the construction and skilled trades sectors. Personizer tracks working hours via a mobile app (iOS and Android)—right on the construction site or at the client’s location, without any additional hardware. Automatic break deductions, labor law alerts, and direct data transfer to DATEV handle tasks that would otherwise require manual processing in the office. For companies with multiple teams and construction sites, this saves several hours of administrative work every month.

Planning vacation time in the skilled trades is difficult for one simple reason: if three technicians are out at the same time, the construction site comes to a standstill. Skilled trades businesses often operate on tightly scheduled work calendars and can hardly accommodate absences on short notice. This makes advance vacation planning a mission-critical task.
Many companies schedule company-wide vacations during the summer months or between Christmas and New Year’s. These periods can be set as blackout dates in Personizer—all employees immediately see when vacation is not possible when submitting a request. This reduces follow-up questions and avoids disappointment when requests must be denied.
Special regulations apply to apprentices: According to the Youth Employment Protection Act (JArbSchG), minors are entitled to up to 30 working days of vacation per year. This is calculated pro-rata from the start of the contract. Personizer maps different work schedules and vacation entitlements in parallel—for journeymen, apprentices, and part-time workers within the same account.Multi-step approval processes ensure that project management and the office are involved before a vacation request is approved. This helps ensure that no project is understaffed while the team is on vacation. The automatic display of public holidays and vacation days by state is particularly useful for companies with employees from different regions or work locations.
Part-time employees and those in mini-jobs have their pro-rated vacation entitlement calculated automatically—based on the agreed-upon weekly working hours. This eliminates the need for manual recalculation with each contract and prevents errors in final payroll processing.

Small businesses have more personnel records to manage than meets the eye: journeyman’s certificates, copies of driver’s licenses, certificates of qualification, first-aid training records, safety briefings, employment contracts, pay stubs, and sick leave certificates. In many businesses, these documents are scattered across paper folders, stored on the boss’s computer, or kept by the tax advisor.
A digital personnel file solves this problem. In Personizer, all documents are stored centrally and can be accessed at any time—even on the go via a browser. Each employee has their own file containing master data, salary history, individual data fields, and document storage. The storage capacity is 1 GB per account.
Particularly important in the trades: GDPR-compliant access control. Not every manager needs to see all data. Site management needs access to working hours and absences, but not to pay stubs. The office manages contracts, but not medical records. Personizer offers granular access rights per role—hosted on ISO-certified EU servers in Germany. The DATEV interface significantly simplifies the monthly data exchange with the tax office: Master data, payroll information, and absences are transferred directly—without manual exports or email attachments. Sick leave notifications are automatically processed digitally via the integrated eAU retrieval (electronic certificate of incapacity for work, mandatory since January 1, 2023). With an average sick leave rate of 5–6% in the skilled trades, this saves a noticeable amount of administrative time.
With a turnover rate in the skilled trades ranging from 10 to 25% depending on the trade, new employees are regularly added and former employees archived. A digital system ensures that no documents are lost, retention periods are adhered to, and all documents are immediately available during tax audits.