Step by step guides for calculating work hours, breaks, overtime & timecard for US workers.
Calculating hours for one employee is simple enough. Calculating hours for five, ten, or fifteen employees, each with different schedules, different pay rates, and different overtime situations, is where payroll mistakes start to compound. This guide covers how to manage multiple employee time cards accurately, what to watch for when different workers follow different rules,…
If your employer rounds your clock-in and clock-out times instead of recording them to the exact minute, you’re working under a time rounding policy. The most common one is called the 7-minute rule, and knowing how it works can help you catch errors before they hit your paycheck. Time rounding is legal under federal law,…
Ever looked at a pay stub and noticed your hours listed as 38.75 instead of 38:45? That’s decimal time, and if it’s ever felt confusing, you’re not alone. Payroll systems don’t work in hours and minutes the way a clock does. They work in hours and decimal fractions, and knowing how that conversion works is…
Ever wondered why some coworkers get overtime pay and others don’t, even when everyone’s putting in the same long hours? The answer almost always comes down to one thing: whether you’re classified as exempt or non-exempt under federal law. This classification directly affects your paycheck every single week. Once you understand which category you fall…
If you work in California, one set of overtime rules isn’t enough to understand. You need to know two, the federal standard and California’s own rules. And when they conflict, California almost always wins. Most U.S. states follow the federal overtime law set by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). California goes further, with daily…
What Is Military Time? Military time uses a 24-hour clock instead of the 12-hour AM/PM system most people grew up with. Rather than resetting at noon and counting from 1 to 12 twice, the 24-hour clock runs straight from 0 at midnight to 23 at 11 PM. Every moment in the day gets its own…
Most of us don’t think twice when we clock in. A tap on the phone, a badge swipe, or a quick entry into a free time card calculator, and the workday begins. But here’s something most people don’t know: the whole idea of precisely recording when an employee starts and stops work is only about…
