What this is
What is a labour log?
What is a labour log?
A labour log is the record of time each person spent on a job, split by trade and by whether that time was hands-on-tools or spent waiting. It is completed as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards, and it is the source data behind cost per asset and wrench-time reporting.
What is wrench time, and why does it matter more than total hours?
Wrench time is the portion of logged hours actually spent working on the asset, as distinct from travel, waiting, or standing by. Two jobs with identical total hours can have very different wrench time, and it is wrench time — not total hours — that tells a planner whether the delay was the job or the conditions around it.
How is a labour log different from a work order?
The work order is the instruction and record for the job as a whole — what, where, who and when. The labour log is the time detail underneath it, capturing every person's hours against that one work order, often with several technicians logging against a single job.
Scope
When is a labour log required?
This log captures the time detail behind a job. Using it as a substitute for the work order itself, or letting it become a shift-end guess, breaks the wrench-time analysis it exists to support.
Use this template when
- One or more people have worked, or are working, hours against a specific work order
- A new record is needed; each one gets its own ID in the form LAB-2026-000
- Hours need splitting between wrench time and travel/waiting so a delay reason is visible, not just a total
- Overtime or a delay reason needs recording against the specific hours it applied to
- A linked record needs this one to exist: links Work Order, Worker
Do not use it for
- Work Order, which is the main record for the job itself, covering what, where, who and when — this log only covers the time spent on it.
- Downtime Record, which tracks asset unavailability, not the hours a technician spent working on or waiting to work on it.
- Maintenance Cost Review, which rolls labour and parts cost up across a period — this log is the per-person, per-job detail that review depends on.
- Weekly Maintenance Schedule, which plans who is assigned to what before the work happens, rather than recording what actually happened.
- Contractor Work Order, which covers a contractor's own time and cost terms separately from internal labour logged here.
Compliance mapping
Which ISO 55001 cl.9.1 requirements does this satisfy?
ISO 55001 cl.9.1 requires monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation of asset management performance, and labour hours against estimate is one of the more direct performance signals a maintenance function can generate from its own records.
| Clause | Requirement | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Time logged is traceable to a specific work order, asset and technician | Header |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Hours are recorded per person, per trade, against a specific date | Labour |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Wrench time is distinguished from travel and waiting time, not folded into a single total | Labour |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Where time was lost to a delay, the cause is recorded rather than left as an unexplained gap | Labour |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Overtime is flagged so cost analysis can separate planned from unplanned labour spend | Labour |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Total hours are measured against an estimate to produce a variance figure | Summary |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Wrench time percentage and main delay cause are calculated at the job level, not left implicit | Summary |
| ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | The log is closed with a technician and supervisor signature confirming the figures | Summary |
What it does not cover
- Hours entered from memory at the end of a shift covering several work orders, which loses the delay reason and wrench-time split the log exists to capture.
- Total Hours filled in with Wrench Time Hours and Travel And Waiting Hours left blank, which reports the cost but hides where the time actually went.
- Delay Reason left as None on a job that visibly overran, which erases the exact signal a planner needs to fix the next occurrence.
- Wrench Time Percent left blank or defaulted despite being a required field, which breaks the site's ability to compare planned against unplanned performance over time.
- Overtime marked No on hours that were clearly worked outside the rostered shift, which understates unplanned labour cost in the summary.
Global
Labour Log requirements by country
Labour hours logging intersects less with product regulation than with working-time law, and the instrument that matters shifts by where the technician is actually employed and working.
Working Time Directive 2003/88/EC
Sets maximum weekly working time, minimum rest periods and limits on average hours including overtime, calculated over a reference period rather than a single shift.
Overtime and hours-worked entries on this log are the underlying evidence a site would need to demonstrate compliance with reference-period averaging, not just a cost figure.
Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833)
Carries forward the same core limits as the EU Directive into UK domestic law, including the 48-hour average working week and rest break entitlements.
A pattern of Overtime: Yes entries against the same technicians across a period is the kind of evidence these regulations expect an employer to be able to produce on request.
Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. §207 (overtime pay)
Requires overtime pay at one and a half times the regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek for non-exempt employees.
Hours Worked and Overtime fields on this log feed directly into payroll exposure under this section, so a technician logging overtime hours as regular time creates a wage compliance gap, not just a reporting one.
How to complete it
How to complete a labour log, step by step
The fields themselves are simple numbers. What decides whether the log is worth trusting later is how honestly the split between them was made in the moment.
A technician waiting on a part is not the same problem as a technician who underestimated the job. Delay Reason exists to separate these, and defaulting it to None whenever the job simply took longer than planned erases exactly the distinction the field is for.
Time spent actively diagnosing a fault is wrench time even without a spanner in hand; time spent waiting for someone else to finish an isolation is not. The judgement call is whether the technician is the one doing something, or the one blocked — not whether their hands are physically on the asset.
A small variance on a routine job is noise. A large variance, or a small variance repeated across every instance of the same job plan, points at an estimate that was wrong from the start — and that is a Job Plan problem, not a labour log problem, once it's spotted.
A single technician on one job for a full shift can reasonably log at the end with little lost. Several technicians moving across multiple jobs in a shift cannot — the more jobs a person touches, the more the wrench-time split degrades into a guess if it isn't captured as each job happens.
What auditors find
Most common labour log findings
The pattern that shows up under review is rarely a missing log. It's a log that was completed on time but with numbers too round, or too tidy, to have come from the actual shift.
| Finding | Clause | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Total Hours consistently equal to a full shift with no Travel And Waiting Hours ever recorded | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Make the wrench time and travel/waiting split mandatory whenever total hours are entered, rather than optional additions. |
| Delay Reason left at None across jobs with a large variance against estimate | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Require a delay reason whenever variance exceeds a set threshold, so the two fields can't silently contradict each other. |
| Overtime marked No on entries logged well outside the technician's rostered shift pattern | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Cross-check Overtime answers against roster data rather than relying on self-declaration alone. |
| Wrench Time Percent entered as a fixed round number (50%, 75%) across most jobs regardless of actual content | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Calculate wrench time percent from the logged wrench and travel/waiting hours automatically instead of asking for a manual estimate. |
| Multiple technicians logging identical hours against the same work order without distinct trade or task detail | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Require each technician's entry to reflect their own trade and role on the job, even where the elapsed time overlaps. |
| Estimated Hours left blank, making the variance percentage meaningless | ISO 55001 cl.9.1 | Pull the estimate automatically from the linked Job Plan rather than leaving it to be typed in, or omitted, on the log. |
Case in point
Case in point: a wrench-time figure that didn't add up
A site reported wrench time consistently around 60% for months, well above the 55% mark associated with well-planned maintenance. A cost review pulled the underlying labour logs to understand what was driving the improvement and found Travel And Waiting Hours left blank on almost every entry, with technicians logging only a single Hours Worked figure at shift end.
The recalculated wrench time, once actual waiting hours from the labour log's own delay reason entries were reconstructed from work order timestamps, came out closer to 30%. The site wasn't performing better than its peers — its logging habit was simply hiding the same delays every comparable site was recording explicitly.
The template
The template, field by field
The form exactly as it installs. Every field, option, score and conditional rule is editable, and the links to other templates come with it.
3 sections
- Reference
- MNT-010
- Archetype
- Log
- Record ID
- LAB-2026-000
- Scoring
- Hours against estimate
- Direction
- n/a
- Singleton
- No
- Basis
- ISO 55001 cl.9.1
- Links
- Links Work Order, Worker
- Tags
- Maintenance, Cost
- Sections
- 3
- Fields
- 28
- Follow up fields
- 0
- Repeating sections
- 1
- Links out
- 3
Header
10 fieldsLog ID*
Auto sequence. Format LAB-2026-0000.
The record's own ID. Other templates point at this value.
Status*
Drives who this goes to next.
- Planned2 pts
- In progress2 pts
- Complete3 pts
- Deferred0 pts
- Open0 pts
- Closed3 pts
- Overdue0 pts
Date and Time*
Raised By*
Site*
Site ID*
Format SITE-000.
Links to FDN-001 Site ID
Area
The area within the site.
Exact Location
Drop a pin for anything hard to find.
Work Order ID*
Links to MNT-002 Work Order ID
Period Covered*
Labour
Repeats9 fieldsTechnician*
Person ID*
Format PER-0000.
Links to FDN-003 Person ID
Trade*
Date*
Hours Worked*
Wrench Time Hours
Hands on tools. The gap between this and total hours is where planning gains live.
Travel And Waiting Hours
Overtime
- No3 pts
- Yes1 pt
Delay Reason
Waiting for parts, permit, isolation, access, information or another trade.
- None3 pts
- Waiting for parts0 pts
- Waiting for permit0 pts
- Waiting for isolation0 pts
- Waiting for access0 pts
- Waiting for information0 pts
- Waiting for another trade0 pts
Summary
9 fieldsTotal Hours*
Estimated Hours
Variance Percent
Wrench Time Percent*
Typically 25 to 35 percent in unplanned environments and over 55 percent in well planned ones.
Main Delay Cause
- None3 pts
- Parts0 pts
- Permit0 pts
- Isolation0 pts
- Access0 pts
- Information0 pts
- Other trade0 pts
Technician*
Signature*
Supervisor*
Second Signature*
MNT-010 · record IDs look like LAB-2026-000 · Links Work Order, Worker
Open in KnowellaRun it with agents
From a document you fill in to a programme that runs itself
The form is the easy part. Keeping the log current through the shift, not at the end of it, and turning the wrench-time detail into a figure someone actually reads is the work that slips.
Holds the labour log against the work order and job plan it belongs to, and rolls wrench time and variance up to asset and site level automatically.
Tracks technician hours, overtime and trade allocation across the roster, so overtime entries here reconcile against actual shift patterns.
Feeds labour hours and overtime into cost per asset and maintenance spend reporting, without waiting for a period-end reconciliation.
Coordinates the crew, rolls completion and exceptions into one view, and holds every write for your approval before it touches a record.
This template lives in KnowMaintain — asset maintenance. Work orders, planned maintenance, calibration, reliability and shutdowns.
Meet KnowMaintain→Glossary
Labour Log definitions and key terms
- Wrench time
- The portion of logged hours spent actively working on the asset, as distinct from travel, waiting or administrative time.
- Variance percent
- The difference between total hours logged and estimated hours, expressed as a percentage, used to judge how reliable job plan estimates are.
- Delay reason
- The recorded cause of lost time on a job — parts, permit, isolation, access, information or another trade — captured against the specific hours affected.
- Period covered
- The scope a single labour log entry represents: this work order, a shift, or a week, set at the header level.
- Trade
- The discipline a technician is logging hours under — mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, refrigeration, fabrication or multi-skilled.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about labour log
What is the labour log template based on?+
It is built against ISO 55001 cl.9.1, monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation of asset management performance — labour hours against estimate is a direct performance signal under that clause.
What sections does the labour log contain?+
There are 3 sections: Header, Labour, Summary. Together they hold 28 fields, 19 of which are required, with the labour block repeating for each person logging time.
How is a labour log scored?+
Scoring is hours against estimate, alongside wrench time, overtime and delay reason. The score exists to surface where planned time is being lost, not to produce a completion percentage.
Can several technicians log time against the same work order?+
Yes — the Labour section repeats for each person, so a job with a mechanical and an electrical technician working together produces two labour entries under one Work Order ID.
Why does the template separate wrench time from total hours?+
Because two jobs with identical total hours can have very different amounts of actual productive time, and it's the gap between them — not the total — that tells a planner where delay is really coming from.
Can the labour log template be changed?+
Yes. Every field, option, score and conditional rule is editable, and the links to other templates come with it. Most teams install it as it is, run it for a cycle, then adjust.
Keep going
Related templates and programmes
Industries this is written for
Programmes this belongs to
Used together in Planned Maintenance
Asset Register
Holds every piece of equipment, machine, vehicle and tool you track
Tool and Equipment Register
Holds portable tools, gauges, lifting accessories and small equipment that sit below asset level but still need control
Maintenance Request
Asks maintenance to look at a problem or carry out a job
Work Order
The main record for a planned maintenance job, covering what, where, who and when
Corrective Work Order
Covers a repair to fix something that has already failed or degraded
Emergency Work Order
Covers urgent work where equipment has stopped or become unsafe
More in Work Orders
Maintenance Request
Asks maintenance to look at a problem or carry out a job
Work Order
The main record for a planned maintenance job, covering what, where, who and when
Corrective Work Order
Covers a repair to fix something that has already failed or degraded
Emergency Work Order
Covers urgent work where equipment has stopped or become unsafe
Work Order Closeout
Confirms the job is finished, the area is safe and the equipment is fit to run
Job Plan
Sets out the steps, parts, tools, permits and time needed for a repeatable job
Written and reviewed by
Siddarth Singh
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Knowella
Certified Safety Professional and industrial and systems engineer with more than a decade inside food supply chain, freight and manufacturing operations. This page was written against the current text of the standards it cites, not against secondary summaries of them.
- Certified Safety Professional (CSP), Board of Certified Safety Professionals
- MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- MS and BS, The Ohio State University, Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Six Sigma Black Belt
Sources and last review. Reviewed 16 August 2026 against:
- ISO 55001:2014 — Asset management systems, Requirements, cl.9.1 Monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation
- Directive 2003/88/EC — Working Time Directive
- Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833)
- Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. §207 — Overtime compensation
This page is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm requirements with your jurisdiction’s regulator.