Papershift vs TimeTac

Papershift

App, browser and a shared tablet terminal where employees identify by PIN or signature, plus offline use with real-time sync to the cloud — desk and deskless are covered, and employees can view and edit their own records with approval shown. Geofencing via GPS restricts where times may be recorded, but I found no public information on what the GPS data stores or whether it can be switched off, and the change history is gated to the top plan.

TimeTac

The breadth is real — PC, mobile with true offline recording, and three hardware terminals with RFID or fingerprint — and employees can correct their own bookings. But GPS is marketed to 'die Leistungen verorten und nachweisen' with no stated limits and no word on what can be switched off, and supervisor approval of corrections is optional with no audit trail of who changed what — that is a §87 negotiation, not a done deal.

Papershift

The vendor itself names the 2022 Federal Labour Court decision and stores start, end and breaks automatically and revision-secure, with employee-specific break rules and an overtime account — that is the core record. I found no public information on checks for the eight and ten-hour daily maximum or the eleven-hour rest period, and the retention statement names no period, only deletion once retention periods lapse.

TimeTac

The vendor asserts EuGH/BAG conformity and 'rechtssicher Arbeits- und Pausenzeit erfassen', and working-time models with surcharges exist — but these are compliance claims, not features. Nothing on the 8/10-hour maximum, the 11-hour rest period, a retention period, or tamper-evident change history; a record that must survive inspection cannot be judged on marketing copy alone.

Papershift

Holiday entitlement, remaining leave and carry-over are calculated automatically, sick days and other absences run through approval paths, and absences feed directly into shift planning with automatic adjustment — the two halves talk to each other. Employee-specific holidays and qualifications exist, yet I found no public information on substitution and swap workflows or rest-period checks before a roster is published.

TimeTac

The absence half is genuinely above par: vacation, comp-time and sickness, online request workflows, automatic balances, carry-over, international holiday templates and deputy rules. But there is not one word about shift or duty rostering anywhere in the evidence — no templates, no coverage, no availability — which caps it below rubric level 5.

Papershift

Every project time can be assigned to an employee, an order or a customer, with tags and notes, an hourly wage stored per employee and reports over costs and hours offered. I found no public information on a billable flag, budget tracking or an invoice-ready export; sevdesk is named as an integration, which is where the billing path appears to end.

TimeTac

Project and order times can be booked with real-time status, role-based access rights and project reports — more than a single project field. But no rates, no billable flag, no cost centre, no budget tracking and no invoice path appear anywhere, so this stays between rubric level 3 and 5.

Papershift

DATEV and LODAS are named, with a DATEV Detail export for the tax office, payroll generated automatically at a chosen cutoff, and Sunday, holiday and night surcharges computed automatically — a real handoff rather than retyping. A red warning triangle flags time or absence data created after payroll generation; I found no public information on a formal lock before transmission or scoped access for the tax adviser.

TimeTac

A vendor-maintained DATEV interface with digital payslips and 'ganz ohne manuellen Export' is a named, major German payroll path — that clears rubric level 5's bar. The evidence is silent on whether surcharges, time accounts or a lock/approval step before transmission are handled, so I cannot credit rubric level 8.

Papershift

The imprint shows a Karlsruhe company registered at the Mannheim court, and EU hosting is promised as a bullet on the pricing page — but no server location or hosting provider is named, and the subcontractor annex is a download rather than a published list. Before I co-sign anything under co-determination I need to know every processor who touches my people's times, and that question stays open.

TimeTac

An Austrian entity with full register details, EU-only hosting with the primary server in Germany and ISO 27001 certification is a decent baseline. But the hosting claim is marketing copy naming no data-centre provider, and there is no subprocessor list anywhere — for a co-determination file, an unnamed processing chain is exactly what cannot be approved.

Papershift

All three tiers carry monthly prices with a 39,00 € base fee excluding VAT, a 10 % saving on annual payment, and the payroll module at 3 € per employee and month on annual payment or 4 € on monthly. Terminal hardware and the report add-ons carry no public number, and the tier prices are not shown per employee while another page speaks of packages from 3,50 EUR per employee per month — the annual invoice is not computable from the pages alone.

TimeTac

Per-user-per-product pricing, monthly billing with the annual saving stated, net prices declared, an online calculator, and hardware terminals priced from €29.90/month lets a buyer get close to the real invoice. What keeps it under rubric level 8: no minimum term is stated, the API and onboarding service are only 'price on request', and the calculator example shows €0.00 in products, so the per-module per-user figures themselves are not verifiable from this sheet.