Timesheet Calculator

What a timesheet has to do

A timesheet does two jobs at once. It records hours worked so an employee can be paid, and it stands as the employer's evidence of those hours if the pay is ever questioned. A timesheet that adds up but assigns hours to the wrong workweek fails the second job even when the arithmetic is perfect.

The mechanics are the same as a time card: elapsed time per shift, minus unpaid breaks, converted to decimal hours, then summed. What changes with a timesheet is the container. Pay periods and workweeks are different things, and the difference drives the overtime calculation.

Pay periods and how they differ

Weekly pay is the simplest to administer for hourly staff because the pay period and the workweek are the same seven days. Biweekly is the most common arrangement in the United States and pays on a fixed day every two weeks, which produces 26 paychecks a year and two months with three paydays.

Semi-monthly pays twice a month, typically on the 15th and the last day of the month, giving 24 paychecks a year. The pay dates are predictable and they line up neatly with monthly accounting, which is why salaried payrolls often use it. For hourly and non-exempt staff it is the most awkward option, because the period boundaries fall in the middle of workweeks.

The rule that matters most

An 80 hour biweekly total tells you nothing about overtime by itself. Eighty hours could be 40 and 40, which owes nothing, or 50 and 30, which owes 10 hours of premium. The pay period is an administrative convenience for issuing checks. The workweek is the legal unit for overtime.

Worked example: 46 hours and 34 hours

An hourly employee earning $22.00 per hour works 46 hours in the first workweek of a biweekly period and 34 hours in the second. The period total is 80 hours.

The naive method looks at 80 hours, sees that it does not exceed 80, and concludes there is no overtime. That reasoning is wrong twice over: the 40 hour threshold applies to each week separately, and the second week being short does not cancel the first week being long.

Sixty six dollars in one period is small. Repeated across a workforce and across 26 pay periods a year it becomes a significant underpayment, and unpaid overtime claims can reach back two years, or three years where the violation is found to be willful, plus liquidated damages.

Semi-monthly periods and split workweeks

Semi-monthly periods almost never align with workweeks. A period running the 16th to the 31st might contain two complete workweeks and two partial ones, with the partial weeks continuing into the next pay period. That creates a practical problem: at the moment payroll closes, the workweeks at each edge are not finished, so their overtime status is not yet known.

Employers handle this in a few standard ways.

• Pay the overtime for a split workweek in the following pay period, once the week is complete. This is generally acceptable as long as it is paid as soon as practicable after the regular payday for that period.
• Run hourly staff on a weekly or biweekly cycle and keep only salaried staff semi-monthly.
• Set the defined workweek so that it at least starts on the 1st and the 16th, which reduces but does not remove the mismatch, since months are not divisible into whole weeks.

Whatever the approach, the calculation still has to be done week by week. A semi-monthly period containing 88 hours is not automatically 8 hours of overtime, and it is not automatically zero either.

Salaried non-exempt employees

Being paid a salary does not by itself make an employee exempt from overtime. Exemption depends on the salary level, the salary basis and, critically, the actual job duties under the executive, administrative, professional, outside sales or computer employee tests. An employee who is paid a salary but does not meet a duties test is non-exempt and is owed overtime.

For a salaried non-exempt employee the regular rate is derived from the salary. Where the salary is intended to cover a fixed number of hours, divide the weekly salary by that number of hours to get the regular rate, then pay the overtime premium on top for hours over 40.

Salaried non-exempt employees still need timesheets. The hours have to be recorded whether or not the base pay changes with them, because the overtime calculation and the record keeping obligation both depend on knowing the daily and weekly hours.

What belongs on a defensible timesheet

• Employee name and identifier, and the department or job code if hours are charged out.
• The date of each workday, with the defined workweek clearly marked so week boundaries are visible inside the pay period.
• Actual clock-in and clock-out times, not just a daily total.
• Start and end of each unpaid meal period, recorded as taken rather than deducted automatically.
• Daily hours in decimal, weekly subtotals, and straight time and overtime split per week.
• Paid leave categories such as holiday, vacation and sick shown separately from hours worked, since paid leave is not normally counted toward the 40 hour overtime threshold.
• A note explaining any correction, with the original entry still legible.

Separating paid leave from worked hours is easy to overlook. An employee who takes an 8 hour holiday and works 36 hours has 44 paid hours but only 36 hours worked, so no federal overtime is owed unless a contract or policy says otherwise.

Approval workflow

Approval turns a set of entries into a record both sides accept. A workable flow has four stages.

1. Entry. Recorded by the employee close to the time worked, ideally daily rather than reconstructed at the end of the period.
2. Employee certification. A sign off confirming the hours are complete and accurate, including any missed break.
3. Manager review. A check against schedules and known absences, with any change discussed with the employee rather than made silently.
4. Payroll lock. The period is closed and further changes go through a documented adjustment on the next run.

Editing an employee's recorded hours without their knowledge is the practice that turns a routine wage question into a serious dispute. If a correction is needed, make it visible, note the reason and keep the original entry.

Record retention

Federal rules require payroll records to be kept for at least three years, and the records underlying wage computations, including timesheets, schedules and adjustment records, for at least two years. Many employers keep everything for four years to align with tax record requirements, and several states set longer minimums. Store the detail, not only the summary totals, because summary totals cannot answer a question about a particular day.