Staying compliant is a serious ask for any business, in any industry, at any size. In regulated industries, particularly, failure to do so can lead to expensive fines, increased audit risk, and client relationships damaged beyond repair.
What's difficult about compliance is that you don't really notice whether you're doing it right or wrong while you're doing the work. But when compliance fails, it's impossible to miss. Compliance is never guaranteed. No guide, software, or policy can promise that with total certainty.
HIPAA, SOX, and state bar rules ask for different things. There's a common denominator between the three, though: you need clear, time-stamped accounts of who did what, and when.
What we'll do is take a practical look at how teams in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legal can prepare activity records that hold up in the event of an audit.
This includes distributed or hybrid teams that operate within sensitive environments like a patient’s home or a client’s private office. We'll also look at how Hubstaff's workforce analytics and time tracking capabilities can streamline that process.
A workforce activity record is a time-stamped log of activities that an employee performed during working hours. This information extends beyond clock-in and clock-out times — it also includes:
Depending on the team or the type of work, it may also include screenshots taken throughout the workday.
How are they different from time sheets?
A time sheet simply tells you how many hours somebody worked. An activity record tells you what happened during those hours.
Most teams will probably find the difference inconsequential on a day-to-day basis. But for teams in regulated industries, it can make or break the outcome of an audit.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
| Basic record | Detailed record |
|---|---|
Employee name + hours logged | Employee name, role, project, hours logged |
Date and total time | Date, time-in, time-out, idle time excluded |
Project or client name | App and URL activity (work-categorized) |
Manager sign-off | Optional screenshot evidence at set intervals |
Exportable timesheets but lacks audit-level detail | Exportable reports for audit or billing reviews |
Ultimately, the goal behind a highly detailed record is to make the record self-sufficient and remove reliance on human recall, so that when an auditor, a client, or a regulator asks what happened on any given day, the record can answer that stand on its own.
Every regulated industry answers to someone:
While the oversight is unique in each case, like we discussed earlier, the underlying question is always the same one: can you show, with evidence, the work your team performed?
Under HIPAA's Security Rule, healthcare organizations are expected to track who accessed protected health information, tie that access to a specific, identifiable person, and cut it off the moment someone's role changes or their employment ends.
This is how a hospital proves, after the fact, that the right people were doing the right work with sensitive patient data.
The requirement to regularly review that activity, not just collect it, is a real struggle that can lead to severe consequences.
The Conduent Business Services data breach is one example: hackers had access to the company’s network for three months before anyone noticed, after which it took another ten months to determine that more than 62 million people had been affected.
The same principle shows up differently for home health and field-based care teams. Geofenced, GPS-enabled time tracking that confirms a caregiver was at a patient's location during a visit is a strong way to match what gets billed with the care given.
Inconsistent records are one of the most common causes of billing disputes. When they happen, it's often for the same reason: the record was reconstructed after the work had already been done, instead of captured while the work was happening.
This problem persists for publicly traded companies too, but with much higher stakes. Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requires management to personally assess whether its financial controls are functioning, and federal law separately makes it a crime to alter or destroy records once an investigation is anticipated.
In practice, this appears as block billing: vague, bundled time entries that clients and others have developed the muscle to distrust. For remote or hybrid finance teams, there's nobody nearby to keep watch before it becomes a dispute. The record has to do the job a manager watching over each team member’s back used to do.
In federal court, Rule 37 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allows a judge to sanction a firm that fails to preserve electronic records once litigation is reasonably foreseeable, sometimes before a lawsuit has even been filed.
This act of preserving electronic records can manifest in smaller (yet no less important) incarnations like a paralegal’s billing entries matching the matter they were logged against or a file access log that has a record of people who accessed which files and when.
Firms are often uneasy with anything that sounds like monitoring, and for good reason: lawyers have built careers on discretion. That said, there's a big difference between watching someone as they work and simply being prepared to answer a question later, and recordkeeping is designed for the latter.
The good news is that you don't need to ask anything big from your team in order to build workforce activity records that you can rely on.
What you need to do is build the recordkeeping into the process of performing the job, instead of treating it as a separate process for after the work is done. Follow these steps:
The outcome here is a recordkeeping system that just runs as the team works, meaning they don’t need to spend mental energy thinking about putting records together. By the time an audit, a billing dispute, or a client review shows up, you will have prepared the answer to any of them.
Hubstaff captures time and activity tracking automatically as work happens:
Managers can adjust screenshot frequency, blur sensitive app information, and set role-based access so team members or managers each see only what their role requires.
When it's time to use the data, whether for a billing cycle, an internal review, or an external audit, you can export the very same records into reports built for that purpose. And with productivity insights and workforce analytics capabilities, Hubstaff turns this raw data into something managers can act on day to day, not just something that won’t be useful until it’s time for an audit.
Accurate, consistent activity records mean fewer surprises during an audit, faster resolution when a client disputes a bill, and a clear answer any time someone asks about work that happened.
That sounds like a lot, but here’s the good news: getting there doesn't require a complicated overhaul. With a tool built to capture that data as work happens, like Hubstaff, the record builds itself as your team works every day.
If you're ready to stop piecing records together and let Hubstaff automate that while providing you with in-depth workforce analytics as the work happens, try a 14-day free trial.