Every Belgian SME knows the feeling: a peak period arrives, you bring in extra hands, and suddenly the tidy administrative picture you had in February looks nothing like the reality on the floor in July or December. Temporary workers, student employees and seasonal staff are essential to getting through busy stretches, but each additional person also adds complexity to time tracking, planning and legal compliance.
The good news is that staying in control does not require a dedicated HR team. It does require consistent processes and the right tools.
Register hours from day one, not day fifteen
With permanent staff, a relaxed approach to time registration might feel manageable. With temporary workers on short contracts, it is a liability. By the time you realise there are gaps in the data, the person may already have left.
Belgium is moving steadily toward mandatory working-time registration for most sectors by 2027, and the underlying logic applies right now: accurate, tamper-evident records protect both the employer and the worker. A server-stamped digital clock-in is far harder to dispute than a hand-written timesheet or a shared spreadsheet corrected multiple times.
Practical steps to get this right:
- Onboard every temporary worker into your time-registration system before their first shift, not after.
- Use a method that records the actual clock-in and clock-out time at the moment it happens, with a server-side timestamp.
- Review data daily during peak periods so that errors can be corrected while the facts are still fresh.
For sites where workers do not have individual devices, a QR code or kiosk clock-in setup removes the friction entirely. Workers scan a code on arrival and departure, and the data lands in your system automatically.
Overtime rules apply to temporary workers too
The 38-hour week, daily limits, weekly ceilings and the annual internal threshold: none of these disappear because someone is on a six-week contract. Belgian labour law makes no distinction based on contract type when it comes to working-time limits.
During busy periods, the pressure to ask people to work a little longer is understandable. But without visibility into cumulative hours, those small overruns compound quickly. Planners who can see in real time how close each team member is to their daily or weekly limit can make better decisions: redistribute tasks, call in an extra person, or adjust the schedule before a breach occurs rather than after.
Tikkit surfaces this information at team and individual level, so a planner overseeing a mix of permanent and temporary staff does not have to run manual calculations to know where the pressure points are.
Flexible rosters that still leave a paper trail
Seasonal operations often mean rosters that shift from week to week or even day to day. That flexibility is operationally necessary, but it does not exempt employers from the legal requirements around notification timelines and minimum rest periods between shifts.
A few things to keep in mind:
- Every roster change should be logged with a date and time, so that you can demonstrate compliance with notice requirements if a social inspection raises the question.
- Minimum rest periods between shifts must be observed even when a worker volunteers to come in earlier.
- Communicating schedules through informal channels like messaging apps creates a documentation gap. A central system keeps everything in one place and traceable.
This matters especially when you have multiple locations or workers moving between sites, which is common during seasonal peaks in logistics, events and food production.
Closing out the season cleanly
When the peak ends, you want to close off quickly: confirm final hours, pass payroll data to your social secretariat, archive contracts. If the data has been collected consistently and digitally throughout the period, that process is straightforward.
If it has not, the end of a busy season becomes its own administrative emergency. Reconstructing hours from memory, correcting inconsistencies and reconciling mismatched records takes time that most SMEs do not have to spare. The case for moving away from spreadsheets is felt most acutely at exactly this moment.
Getting seasonal workforce management right is not just about avoiding fines or passing inspections. It is about running a business that can scale up and scale back down without losing institutional knowledge or creating legal exposure. With consistent processes in place, a busy August or a hectic December becomes something you manage, not something that manages you.