How to prove the hours you worked

If a paycheck doesn’t match the hours you worked, the question becomes: can you show what those hours were? The good news is that you don’t need a badge scanner or your employer’s cooperation. Your own record of your hours — kept as you worked them, not reconstructed months later — is real evidence, and in practice it is often the deciding evidence.

Your own record counts

In the U.S., employers are the ones legally required to keep time records for non-exempt employees. When they don’t — or their records are wrong — courts and labor agencies routinely accept the worker’s own contemporaneous log, supported by whatever else fits the pattern: schedules, texts about coming in early, pay stubs. Where an employer’s records fail, a worker’s consistent, dated log becomes the best evidence in the room. The key word is contemporaneous: a record made at the time, day by day, is credible in a way a reconstruction never is.

What a defensible record looks like

• Made at the time. Clock in when you start, clock out when you stop — or log the shift the same day.
• Specific. Actual start and end times and breaks — not “about 9 hours.”
• Complete. Every shift, including short ones and the ones that ran over. Gaps are what opposing counsel asks about.
• Contextual. A note on the unusual days — “asked to stay for delivery,” “worked through lunch” — ties your log to events other people remember.
• Exportable. When it matters, you need the record as a document you can hand over, not screenshots of an app.

Keeping that record in Valio

• One-tap punches create timestamps as you work — the definition of a contemporaneous record — with clock-in reminders so shifts don’t go missing.
• The real punch stays on the record. If your employer rounds to the nearest quarter hour, Valio can round the same way for pay — while keeping your exact clock-in and clock-out times preserved underneath. If rounding is ever the dispute, you have both numbers.
• Notes, tips, and expenses on the day they happened, on a timeline you can walk through date by date.
• Export the whole story as PDF or CSV — every entry dated, every rate named and subtotaled, your name on the document — generated on your device whenever you need it.
• Your record can’t be edited by anyone but you. No shared account, no employer portal: the log lives on your iPhone.

Valio also shows its math — which rule applied to which minutes and why — so when you compare a paycheck against your log, you’re comparing itemized numbers, not two mystery totals.

Valio is a record-keeping tool, not legal advice. If real money is at stake, a local employment lawyer or labor agency can tell you what applies where you work — and they will be glad you kept a log.