A Pre-Filing Check Service Built on Electronic Card Records

Clock-ins are recorded, but filing is not automatically complete

The Construction Workers’ Electronic Card (건설근로자 전자카드) is a Korean system that records when workers enter and leave a construction site, using a card or mobile method. These records form the basis for filings that build retirement mutual aid contributions according to the number of days worked by daily and temporary construction workers.

Since January 1, 2024, construction projects required to enroll in the retirement mutual aid scheme have also fallen under the Electronic Card requirement. According to Work24 guidance, the baseline threshold is a planned project value of KRW 100 million or more for public projects and KRW 5 billion or more for private projects.

Sites with a planned project value below KRW 300 million, or where terminal installation is difficult, can use the Construction Workers Mutual Aid Association mobile app, which uses location information, instead of a fixed terminal. A smaller site is not exempt from recording attendance; only the recording method changes.

Tapping an Electronic Card does not automatically complete a retirement mutual aid filing. The person responsible must confirm each worker’s employer, occupation, actual days worked, and eligibility for retirement mutual aid. They must correct missing or incorrect records before finalising work records.

This work repeats every month. Employers must report workdays and pay mutual aid contributions by the 15th of the following month, so records may be reconciled in batches at the start of the month and just before the deadline.

A focused check before a retirement mutual aid filing

Some construction workforce management services provide their own attendance and site-entry recording features.

The Electronic Card changes the starting point for services that use attendance records. Because attendance records accumulate through a public system, a new service may not need to build site-entry terminals itself. It can focus on the next step: finding errors and sending work alerts.

Consider a labour administrator at a reinforced-concrete subcontractor with around 45 employees and daily workers moving between three sites. In the morning, they compare the roster sent by the site foreman with the people who arrived, then use phone calls and messaging to check on people without a card or people who missed a tag.

Work increases at month-end. The administrator places the Electronic Card screen, daily attendance log, and payroll materials side by side. They compare the same person’s name and employer, then separate people who have a tag but are not subject to filing from people who worked but have no tag.

Fractional workdays must be combined with the following month. Workers who are not subject to filing, such as people contracted for one year or longer, must also be separated. Records have been digitised, but the responsible person still has to make judgments and manual corrections in the system.

The separable product slice here is a pre-filing record check for retirement mutual aid. It brings together, on one screen, the days remaining until the deadline, people without an employer listed, people with a clock-in but no clock-out, workdays carried over from the previous month, and records that differ from the daily attendance log.

After adoption, the administrator does not need to compare every person from the beginning. They review only people marked as exceptions. If the service retains the reason for a correction and the person who confirmed it, the team can quickly find how the same issue was handled when it recurs the next month.

Final responsibility for deciding retirement mutual aid eligibility and whether work actually took place remains with a person. Whether Electronic Card records can be integrated externally needs verification, so a practical first step is to confirm what files or screens the administrator can access.

Overseas services started with a small problem

The performance figures below are each supplier’s own claims and need separate verification. Their common pattern is that they started with one repetitive area—attendance, training, or safety documents—rather than replacing an entire construction-management operation.

US-based Workyard tracks clock-in and clock-out times and site locations for construction workers moving across multiple sites, then passes the information to payroll. Its published entry plan for annual billing charges about KRW 8,000 per worker per month plus a base fee of about KRW 70,000.

AV Decking, a deck installation company, started with a problem: managers estimated each worker’s day as 10 hours. According to a Workyard case study, the company used the service across all sites within six weeks and reported payroll-accuracy gains exceeding about KRW 200 million.

Germany’s doinstruct sends smartphone-based safety training to workers who change frequently and speak multiple languages, then records completion. It has no fixed public pricing; companies receive quotes based on worker count, languages, and training content.

Construction company Echterhoff started in 2024 by moving repeated site training to mobile. According to a doinstruct case study, it now trains 670 people in more than 35 languages, runs more than 40 short training modules, and reported a 42% reduction in serious site incidents.

Australia’s HammerTech brings together worker training, subcontractor documents, and safe-work documents by site. Rather than charging per worker, it says it provides company-specific quotes based on site count, project scale, and operational complexity, with no separate fee for subcontractors.

Construction company Flexem started by reducing paper safety documents that reached up to 350 pages per site. According to a HammerTech case study, workers completed common training that had taken 30 to 40 minutes on site before arriving, and the training record could be reused across other projects for 12 months.

What could emerge from this

1. A retirement mutual aid deadline check inbox

• What it does: Selects only people in Electronic Card records with missing, duplicate, unassigned-employer, or eligibility-review issues.
• Who uses it: Specialty construction contractors managing about 20 to 100 people, including daily workers, with only one or two labour administrators.
• Why now: Attendance is collected through the Electronic Card, but responsibility for finalising work records and filing remains with the employer.
• First screen: Put the days remaining until the 15th of the following month and the number of workers needing review in the most prominent position.

2. A morning staffing-gap alert

• What it does: Compares today’s staffing plan with actual attendance records and flags absent people and trades with too few workers.
• Who uses it: Companies with 20 to 60 employees that distribute electrical, fire-protection, or facilities workers across three or more sites.
• Why now: Site-level attendance records create a reference point for checking foremen’s phone reports.
• First screen: Show planned headcount, present headcount, and staffing shortfall by site using traffic-light colours.

3. A pre-work training checklist

• What it does: Checks whether workers arriving today have completed basic safety training and additional site-specific training, then separately marks incomplete workers.
• Who uses it: Safety managers at principal-contractor sites where foreign and short-term workers change frequently and more than 50 people enter each day.
• Why now: The site can obtain an arrival list first, reducing the need to search the entire paper training register every day.
• First screen: Split today’s arrivals into people cleared to work, people needing training verification, and people whose work is on hold.

4. An emergency site headcount board

• What it does: During a fire or collapse risk, shows people who may still be on site and the time of their last record.
• Who uses it: Medium-sized construction sites with multiple entrances, where principal-contractor and subcontractor workers work together.
• Why now: Clock-in and clock-out records can be reused for emergency headcount checks, though actual evacuation confirmation must happen separately.
• First screen: Prominently display the current headcount, people without a confirmed clock-out, and contact details by subcontractor.

What to check today

Ask one labour administrator at a site covered by the Electronic Card requirement to show you last month’s work-record finalisation screen. Spend 30 minutes asking which records they corrected manually. If they corrected the same type of error three or more times and expect it to recur next month, a pre-filing check service is worth testing.

Why this matters where you are

Korea’s Electronic Card requirement and retirement mutual aid filing rules create a specific source of attendance data and a fixed filing deadline. In your market, check whether regulated attendance, payroll, insurance, or worker-benefit records create a similar handoff from recorded data to human review. Even where the regulation differs, repeated reconciliation between attendance, staffing, and payroll records may still be a focused problem to solve.