Two weeks off with a bad back. First day back at the yard, I slot the card in, dismiss the manual entry prompt on the tachograph screen without really reading it, and pull out of DIRFT at half five in the morning thinking nothing of it.
Three weeks later, roadside check at the M6 J18 Knutsford site. The examiner downloads the card and comes back five minutes later asking why there's a blank 14-day gap in the activity record. Not a missing day — a clean, empty fortnight where nothing at all is recorded.
I explained I'd been off sick. That's fine, he said. But the card should show something. Even if it's rest. Even if it's absence. A completely blank gap flags in the analysis software because it looks like the card was out of the vehicle without being recorded — or worse, that activity was happening that isn't on the card at all.
Took about twenty minutes to sort out, no penalty in the end, but I drove away knowing I'd done it wrong. And I've seen drivers make the same mistake since. The manual entry prompt on reinsertion isn't optional tidying-up. It's a regulatory requirement under Article 34 of Regulation (EU) 165/2014 — the tachograph equipment regulation — and most drivers I know skip it every time.
What Article 34 actually says
Article 34 of Regulation (EU) 165/2014 sets out the obligations for using a tachograph. Most of it you know already — card in from the start of the working period, don't remove it before the end of the daily working period, record driving accurately.
But Article 34(5) is the one that trips people up. When a driver has been absent from the vehicle — sick leave, annual leave, days off, non-driving work away from a tachograph vehicle — they must, on reinserting the card, use the manual entry facility to record the activity during the period the card was out.
The four categories you can record are: driving, other work, availability, and rest/breaks/annual leave/sick leave. For time off sick, you're recording the sick leave category. Annual leave — same category. A day off at home between tramping runs — rest. It doesn't have to be complicated. But it has to be there.
For digital tachographs, the manual entry screen comes up automatically when you insert your card if the system detects a gap since the last insertion. It asks you to account for the period. Some drivers just confirm through it as fast as they can to get the card running. That's the mistake — the entry you rush through goes in as one block, potentially incorrectly categorised, which then causes its own problems.
Why the blank gap is a problem
Your driver card, when analysed, shows a continuous record of activity or deliberate absence. The analysis software DVSA and your operator's tacho analyser use looks for periods of time unaccounted for.
A blank gap of several hours could mean a rest period taken without a card inserted — which happens and isn't necessarily wrong, but triggers a check. A blank gap of several days looks like either the card was removed from the vehicle while the vehicle was in use, or activity occurred without the card in place. Both of those are potential manipulation flags.
Tachograph fraud analysis — under s.99ZA of the Transport Act 1968 — looks specifically at patterns like card-not-present during vehicle movement or unexplained activity gaps. A blank fortnight during sick leave won't lead to a fraud investigation when you can explain it. But it will delay you at the roadside, generate a question in any compliance review, and sit in the record looking wrong until someone accounts for it.
If you're an agency driver going between yards, a blank card gap is something each new TM has to explain to themselves when they download the card at the start of your engagement. Most will ask. Some will make assumptions. Neither is something you want to be sorting out three months after the leave period ended.
How to do it properly
On reinsertion, when the manual entry prompt appears, take the thirty seconds to do it right. Don't just hammer through the confirmation screens.
Select the correct start date and time — the moment you removed the card at the end of your last working day before the leave. Select the correct end date and time — the moment you're inserting the card now. Choose the appropriate activity: rest/sick leave for sick days, annual leave for holiday, rest for days off.
If the absence was mixed — some sick days, then some annual leave, then a day of non-driving office work — you can enter the periods separately. The screen lets you build a record of multiple activity periods covering the whole gap. Takes maybe two minutes for a two-week absence. Worth every second of it.
For analogue tachograph discs (older vehicles still running them), the obligation is the same in principle — you should annotate the disc or create a manual record on paper to account for the period. The specifics of how analogue entry works differ from digital, but the principle under Article 34 is the same: the gap must be accounted for.
What happens when it goes unchecked
The card record follows you. Doesn't matter if you change employer, change agency, change region. Every operator who downloads your card sees the full record the card holds — which covers approximately the last 28 days of activity. If you took two weeks off sick three weeks ago and didn't enter the absence, the blank gap is right there in the window they're looking at.
And it feeds into the operator's record too. When your operator's tacho analyser processes your card, unexplained gaps get flagged in the infringement report. Even if there's no penalty, the TM has to review and annotate it. For a small fleet already stretched on compliance admin, that's unnecessary work and a gap in the records that needs explaining at the next audit.
I've had this conversation with a mate who runs a 7-vehicle Midlands fleet. He'd had two drivers return from holiday without entering the absence on reinsertion. Both cards showed blank weeks. His OCRS assessment included a note about unexplained card activity gaps. Minor, in his case — didn't move the score — but it was there, and the next DVSA premises visit asked about it.
Non-driving work days
There's a variation on this that catches people who do mixed roles — driving some days, yard work or office work other days. If you're not in a tachograph vehicle on a given working day, the card isn't in a machine recording anything. But the obligation to account for your time doesn't disappear.
On reinsertion, those days need to go in as 'other work' — not as rest or absence. You were working. You just weren't driving. The distinction matters under EU 561/2006 and for the working-time picture the operator needs to be able to demonstrate. Recording a day in the office as 'rest' because you weren't driving is wrong and will mismatch against the working-time records the operator holds for that day.
Transport managers doing office work who also hold a driver card — same thing applies. If you drove a company vehicle last Tuesday, that record needs to be accurate, and the days you spent doing TM admin in the office but not driving still need to be accounted for correctly on reinsertion.
The driver card retention question
One last thing worth knowing. Your driver card holds roughly the last 28 days of activity data. That's the download minimum under the operator's obligation — every 28 days at most. But the operator keeps the downloaded data for at least 12 months, longer if the tacho data is the only source of working-time records under the WTD (in which case the obligation extends to 24 months).
That means correct manual entries aren't just about what a roadside examiner sees today. They're part of a 12-to-24-month record that feeds into compliance reviews, TC disclosures, and DVSA premises inspections. A correctly completed manual entry on a sick day in January might matter at an audit the following November.
The thirty seconds to do it right on reinsertion is worth it every single time.
If you're tired of tracking driver activity gaps manually, ShiftOwt flags card activity issues and WTD gaps automatically — £5.99/mo for drivers, fleet pricing on request.