Overtime Rules: How Regular, Overtime, and Double-Time Hours Are Calculated

What Overtime Rules Do

Employees don't have to do anything different for overtime. They clock in and out of jobs the same way they always do — by barcode scan, timer, or timesheet — and Standard Time® works out afterward which of those hours are regular time, which are overtime, and which are double time. The answer comes from a short list of overtime rules that an administrator sets up once for the whole company.

The result shows up as four extra columns you can add to the Time Logs grid: Regular hours, Overtime hours, Double-time hours, and an Overtime summary that names the rule responsible for each piece. Because they're calculated rather than typed in, they stay right as time logs are added, edited, or corrected — change a start time or a rule, and the split updates to match.

Regular time, overtime, and double time are always three slices of the same total — Regular + Overtime + Double time = Actual work, on every row and in every total. Overtime rules never add or remove hours; they only decide which bucket each hour belongs in.

Opening the Overtime Rules Grid

Overtime rules are an administrator setting. To open them:

The Admin menu only appears for administrator accounts, and changing a rule's settings requires the Administer users right. See the User Setup Guide for how rights are granted.

Every Rule Setting, Explained

Each rule's Properties panel is divided into five groups. Here's what every field means and how it's used in the calculation.

The Five Methods

Every rule uses one of five methods. Three look at one day at a time; two look at the whole week.

Rules of different methods work together. A common setup is a daily rule for over 8 hours plus a weekly rule for over 40 hours — Standard Time® makes sure an hour already counted as daily overtime is never counted a second time as weekly overtime.

How a Day's Hours Are Split

Overtime is worked out per employee, one day at a time. The idea at the center of it all is simple: the day's time logs are laid end to end, in the order they started. The first minute the employee worked that day is hour 0; if they worked 13 hours, the last minute is hour 13. Each rule that applies claims a stretch of that line, and each time log gets whatever part of the line it sits on.

Step by step:

1. Gather the day's time logs. A time log belongs to the day it starts on — a shift that runs past midnight counts entirely toward the day it began.
2. Lay them end to end in start-time order. Gaps between time logs (lunch, breaks) don't count; only the hours actually logged do.
3. Check each daily and holiday rule in Order. A rule is skipped if today isn't one of its Days (or, for a holiday rule, today isn't a holiday), or if the day's total isn't greater than its Daily > hours.
4. Each rule that applies claims its band — from Daily > hours up to Daily <= hours — as its Result type.
5. Continue rules. If the rule that just applied has Continue rules set to No, no more daily rules are checked for that day.
6. Resolve overlaps. If two claimed bands overlap, each hour is counted once, as the highest type: Double time beats Overtime beats Regular. Any hour no rule claimed is regular.
7. Split each time log by where it falls on the line. A time log that straddles a boundary is divided — part regular, part overtime.

Here's what that looks like for Friday in the example week, where the employee logged a 6-hour morning and a 7-hour afternoon:

Do you need a Regular Time rule? No. Any hour no rule claims is regular already, so a rule with Result type Regular Time never moves hours anywhere. The example's "Mon - Fri (RT)" rule is there to make the setup self-documenting and to record the regular-time multipliers. Just keep its Continue rules set to Yes — see Tips for why.

How Weekly Rules Work

Weekly rules run after all seven days' daily and holiday rules are finished, and they only look at hours that are still regular. Those remaining regular hours are laid end to end across the whole week in start-time order, and every hour past the weekly limit is claimed by the rule. The week begins on the week-start day set for your account.

That order is what prevents double counting. An hour that a daily rule already made overtime isn't counted toward the weekly limit, so it can't be made overtime a second time.

A few more things to know about weekly rules:

• A weekly rule claims every hour past its limit, with no upper end. To add a second tier — say, double time past 60 hours — add another weekly rule with Weekly hours 60 and Result type Double time. Between 40 and 60 the overtime rule wins; past 60 both rules claim the hours, and double time beats overtime.
• Continue rules works the same way as for daily rules: a weekly rule that applies with Continue rules set to No stops the weekly rules after it.
• With "Weekly hours exceed employee schedule," the limit is the employee's own scheduled hours for that week, so a part-time employee scheduled for 24 hours starts overtime at hour 24.

Example: Six Rules for a Typical Shop

The example in this guide uses six rules that together describe a common policy: time-and-a-half after 8 hours on weekdays, double time past 12 hours, time-and-a-half all day Saturday, and double time all day Sunday and on holidays.

Here is each rule's Properties panel:

Example: One Week, Line by Line

One employee welded on job 10200 every day of the week of Monday, September 14 — a morning and an afternoon time log each weekday, and a single time log on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, September 20 is on the Holiday Calendar in this example. With the Time Logs grid filtered to Last week and job 10200, here's how every line works out:

This example has no weekly rule. If you added one for over 40 hours, it would change nothing this week: after the daily rules, exactly 40.00 regular hours remain, and 40 isn't over 40.

The Overtime Columns in Time Logs

To see overtime results, add the columns to the Time Logs grid: right-click a column header, choose to insert a column, and pick any of the four below. They're read-only — to change the results, change the time logs or the rules.

A few more things worth knowing:

• Totals work. All three hour columns add up in group rows and in the Totals at Top/Bottom row, as in the 60 / 40 / 15 / 5 row for job 10200 in the screenshot above.
• Filtering doesn't change the math. Overtime is always worked out from all of an employee's time logs for the week, whatever the grid is filtered to. Filtering to one job shows that job's share — if the employee also worked on another job that day, the hours on both jobs count toward the 8-hour line.
• These columns can't be sorted, since they're calculated on the fly rather than stored.
• Who can see them. The overtime columns are only available to users with the Can view salary rates and costs right, the same right that shows salary rates.
• They stay current. Saving a time log, an overtime rule, an employee schedule, or a holiday refreshes the results right away; changes made by someone else show up within about a minute.

Tips and Common Surprises