A visit from the Belgian social inspection service rarely comes with much warning. If your working-time records are in good shape, that is not a problem. Tikkit lets you produce a complete, structured export in a handful of clicks, giving inspectors precisely the information they need without requiring you to scramble through spreadsheets or stitch together data from different sources. Here is what the export contains and how to generate it.
What a Tikkit export actually includes
A legally compliant working-time record covers considerably more than a list of clock-in and clock-out times. The legal requirements for a valid working-time record in Belgium specify that the following must be traceable for each employee and each calendar day:
- Full name and identification number (national register number or equivalent)
- Date and day of the week
- Start and end time of every work period, including breaks
- Total hours worked per day
- Weekly and quarterly cumulative summaries
- Overtime hours, with a reference to the applicable regime (recovery time or pay supplement)
- Absences: annual leave, sick leave, time credit and their approval status
Tikkit generates all of this automatically from server-stamped clock events. The timestamps are immutable: no one can alter a clocking after the fact without leaving a visible trace in the audit log, which is exactly what inspectors look for when they assess the reliability of a system.
How to generate the export
The process takes three steps:
- Select the period. Choose a single day, a week, a calendar month or a full quarter. A free date range is also available, which is helpful when an inspector requests a specific reference period that does not align neatly with a calendar boundary.
- Set the scope. Filter by individual employee, team, department or the whole organisation. If you use temporary or seasonal workers alongside your permanent staff, you can include them in the same report. Managing hours for those groups is straightforward in Tikkit, as described in our article on keeping seasonal and temp-staff hours under control.
- Choose the format and export. Tikkit offers a PDF suitable for handing directly to an inspector, and a structured CSV or Excel file for internal analysis. Both carry an automatic generation timestamp and the name of the user who created the export.
The entire operation takes under two minutes, even for organisations with dozens of employees across multiple departments.
Overtime and deviations: nothing hidden
One of the key things inspectors check is whether an employer has stayed within Belgian overtime limits: the daily cap, the weekly cap and the internal threshold. Tikkit automatically calculates whether any day or week has breached those boundaries and flags the deviations clearly within the export. An inspector can see at a glance whether overtime was recovered or paid out and whether the correct procedure was followed. For a closer look at how that detection works, our article on automatic overtime detection in Tikkit goes into the detail.
Absences appear in a dedicated section with their category and the date on which they were approved, removing any ambiguity about days when an employee was not at work.
Building the habit before 2027
Belgium is moving toward mandatory working-time registration for virtually all sectors by 2027. Generating an inspector-ready export will not be optional; it will be a baseline expectation. The organisations that will find that transition easiest are those already using a structured system today, because their historical data will already be clean, complete and exportable.
Tikkit retains all records for the legally required retention period and can regenerate historical exports for quarters that have long since closed. When an inspector calls, the response is simply to log in, set the parameters and click export.