Seasonal crews: proving the hours when the workers are long gone

It is the third week of August, the site is running full tilt, and a car you do not recognise pulls up at the gate. Two people get out with lanyards and a clipboard, and they would like to see who is working today and how many hours each of them has done this month. Half your crew started in June for the summer push. One lad you took on for a fortnight left last Friday, and you are not entirely sure you could spell his surname without checking. And now someone official would like the full picture, please, by name, by day, by hour.

That is the moment seasonal work stops being a staffing convenience and turns into a paperwork problem you did not see coming. Every summer the same thing plays out across the trades. Construction ramps up for the good weather, hospitality doubles its floor staff, cleaning contractors take on extra hands for the holiday turnover, growers bring in pickers. Crews swell with people who arrive for a few weeks, move around, and are gone by the time the leaves turn. Brilliant for getting the work out of the door. Miserable for one specific thing: proving, later, exactly who did what and when.

And later always comes. It is September, the season is winding down, and your phone rings. It is the seasonal worker who left in August, and he reckons he is short two weeks of pay. He is polite about it, mostly. He just wants what he is owed. And now you have to reconstruct a fortnight of someone else’s hours, for a person who no longer works for you, from a paper sheet a supervisor filled in, a supervisor who has also, naturally, gone home for the season.

Why seasonal crews are the worst case for proof

Think about what makes a record trustworthy in the first place. It is written down by the person who did the work, at the time they did it, and it stays put. A permanent crew gives you most of that almost by accident: the same faces every day, a rhythm everyone knows, a manager who would notice if a Tuesday went missing. Seasonal work strips all of it away. High churn means new names constantly. Fixed-term contracts mean people leave with the work half-remembered. And the busiest, most temporary corners of the economy happen to be the ones under the closest watch.

There is the right-to-work angle on top of it. Those checks are not optional for the short-timers. The guidance is blunt: you check everyone before they start, temporary and seasonal included, and you keep the copies for the length of their employment and two years after they have gone. So the very worker you are least likely to remember is the one the law expects you to remember longest.

Then there are the hours themselves. Employers have to keep records showing they have stayed inside working time limits, and those must be held for two years. From April 2026 it goes further still: a new duty under the Employment Rights Act 2025 means you must keep adequate records to show holiday and holiday pay have been handled correctly, retained for six years, with failure to keep them becoming an offence in its own right rather than something that only bites if a worker complains. Six years is a long time to stay confident about a lad who was on site for eleven days in July.

Now set those two facts side by side. The proof burden falls heaviest exactly where your memory is thinnest. When the inspection lands in August, or the disputed-pay call comes in September, “I am fairly sure he was here most days” is not an answer, it is an admission. And the honest truth is that most seasonal worker hours live in precisely that fog: a photo of a tea-stained timesheet, a WhatsApp thread, a supervisor’s word against a former worker’s. You can run the tightest site in the county and still be one absent supervisor away from having nothing you can actually hand over.

What the proof actually has to look like

So what does hold up? Not a record that lives in the site manager’s head, that much is certain. The hours have to be logged by each worker for themselves, from the very first shift, and each entry has to carry a name, a time and a place, and stay attached to that person even after they have drifted off to the next job three months down the line. The instant clocking in depends on someone else remembering to do it for a crew of temporary faces, you have already lost. It has to be individual, it has to record itself, and it has to survive the worker walking away.

That is the plain principle, and it is the whole reason GeoTapp was developed. Each person on the crew clocks in and out from their own phone, one tap to start and one to finish, and every stamp is tied to who, when and where. When the season ends and the worker is long gone, the record stays, and you can pull it out for a single person over a single fortnight without an archaeological dig. The tool checks location only at the moment of clocking in and out, never in between, because this is proof of work, not a tracker pointed at people’s backs. That distinction is the whole point: the same record that protects you in an inspection is the record that gets the seasonal worker paid correctly, which is what both of you actually wanted from the arrangement.

Before the next August

The season is short, and it always feels like there is no time to sort the admin before the rush arrives. But the rush is precisely when the gap opens, and the bill for it turns up months later, once the crew has scattered and you are trying to prove something you can no longer see. So here is the question worth sitting with before you take on this summer’s extra hands: if an inspector walked onto your site tomorrow, or a worker who left in August rang you in September, could you show, per person and per hour, exactly what happened? If the answer makes you wince, that is worth fixing now rather than in the reconstruction afterwards. You can set up a trial and have this summer’s crew clocking in properly before the next van pulls up at the gate.