What must your WBSO hour records contain at a minimum?
RVO is brief about it: at a minimum, separate hours by day, by project and by employee. A line like ‘Jan, March, project A, 64 hours’ is too coarse. A line like ‘Jan, Tuesday 10 March, project A, 6 hours’ is the baseline.
The projects in your hour records are the projects in your R&D declaration (S&O-verklaring). Use the same names, so an auditor can see without explanation which hours belong to which approved project.
- Employee: who did the R&D work.
- Date: the day the work happened.
- Project: the R&D project as named in your application.
- Hours: the time spent on R&D that day.
- Short description: not required per line, but it makes the link to your project documents easy.
What does a week look like?
Below is one week for two employees. Note Sara's Wednesday: she was on leave, so there are no R&D hours. Tom did no R&D work on Friday, so nothing is recorded there either.
| Employee | Date | Project | Hours | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sara de Vries | Mon 9 Mar | Stock forecasting model | 6 | Test setup for seasonal patterns, first measurement run |
| Sara de Vries | Tue 10 Mar | Stock forecasting model | 5.5 | Analysed deviations in the run, adjusted features |
| Sara de Vries | Wed 11 Mar | — | 0 | Leave |
| Tom Bakker | Mon 9 Mar | Sensor housing v2 | 4 | Printed prototype 3, set up heat test |
| Tom Bakker | Tue 10 Mar | Sensor housing v2 | 7 | Ran heat test, recorded condensation at 40 °C |
| Tom Bakker | Thu 12 Mar | Stock forecasting model | 3 | Fed sensor data into the model, first validation |
Your own system doesn't have to look like this. It only has to show the same information per day, project and employee.
How often do you update the hours?
RVO asks you to update the realised R&D hours in your own records at least every 10 working days. That's a minimum. If you record daily, you never have to reconstruct after two weeks what happened on a Monday.
A practical rhythm: everyone logs at the end of the day, and one person checks for gaps every two weeks. That keeps you well inside the limit, even when someone forgets a few days.
- Log R&D hours on the day itself, per project.
- Every two weeks, check for missing days and for hours on leave or sick days.
- After each quarter, put the hours next to that quarter's project documents.
What about leave and sickness?
Don't write R&D hours for employees who are ill or on leave. RVO can compare your hour records with your absence and leave records. An R&D day on a day someone is also recorded as sick stands out immediately.
So record leave and sickness in the same system as your hours, or compare them at least every two weeks. How to track leave is in Recording leave.
How do you link hours to the project records?
Alongside the hours you keep project records that show the type, content and progress of the work: meeting notes, reports, drawings, photos of prototypes, test results and calculations. For software that includes designs, code and commits, and test reports.
Bundle the documents per project and give each a date and the author's name. The project records must be ready within two months after each calendar quarter ends, and you keep them for seven years. There has to be a visible link between hours and documents: if Tom logged seven hours on a heat test on 10 March, a test report from that date belongs with it.
A short description per line isn't required, but it makes that link much easier. Examples are in Describing WBSO activities.
RVO's template or your own system?
RVO offers an Excel file, the ‘Model urenstaat WBSO’. It works for a small team with one or two projects. With more people or projects, separate spreadsheets get error-prone: files go missing, formulas break and nobody sees whether the weeks are complete.
You may also use your own time tracking, which keeps R&D hours, regular hours and leave in one place. Pick whatever your team will actually keep up daily.
How Half5 does it
In Half5 every entry has a date, an employee, a project and an activity, and leave (holiday, sick, special leave) lives in the same system. Create an activity ‘WBSO’ set to ‘Non-billable’ and one project per R&D project. The per-employee or per-project report, filtered on that activity, then shows the R&D hours, and the absence report shows leave to compare against.
Half5 doesn't block R&D hours on leave days and has no WBSO export or RVO form. You export to CSV or Excel; the columns include date, employee, project, activity, hours and description.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to write down what I did for every hour?
RVO doesn't require a description per hour in the hour records; the content of the work belongs in the project records. A short description per day does make the link between the two much easier.
Can I fill in WBSO hours afterwards?
You update the hours at least every 10 working days. Filling them in at the end of the year doesn't fit that rule and is hard to back up in an audit.
Does the timesheet need a signature?
RVO's page on R&D records doesn't mention signatures. What counts is that hours per day, project and employee are right and match the project documents.
When must the project records be ready?
Within two months after each calendar quarter ends. For the first quarter that means by the end of May.
Can I use my normal time tracking for the WBSO?
Yes, RVO allows your own system. Make sure you can show R&D hours separately per day, per project and per employee, for example with a dedicated activity.
Sources
- RVO, Keeping your R&D records (Dutch) · checked on
- RVO, WBSO (Dutch) · checked on
