Hours, breaks, and what they actually come to TIMESHEET

Adding up hours is not the problem

The sum is almost never the thing being paid. Some of those hours are at a different rate because of when they happened: nights, weekends, a public holiday. Some are at another rate because of how many there were, once the ordinary week is full. Some are not paid at all, because they are a break.

So the useful output is not a total, it is a split: ordinary hours, night hours, weekend hours, overtime, and unpaid breaks, each counted separately. That is what a payroll needs and it is what a query is answered with, and a timesheet that produces a single number has thrown away the information the argument will be about.

The edge that catches every hand-built spreadsheet is a shift crossing midnight. Finish minus start goes negative, and the usual fix (adding a day when the finish is earlier than the start) works until somebody works a twenty-five hour split shift or forgets to record a date. A night shift is the normal case in the industries where this matters most, so it has to be right rather than nearly right.

Breaks, and why they have to be explicit

An unpaid break is a deduction from paid time, and whether it was taken is a question of fact that comes up later. Recording “8 till 4” and quietly assuming half an hour is how a timesheet ends up disagreeing with a rota, a clocking system and somebody's memory.

Record the break as a break. If it was not taken, that is worth knowing too, both because it is payable and because a pattern of untaken breaks is a working-time problem before it is a payroll one.

Keep the working, and agree the rules first

The thresholds are yours to set, because they come from a contract or an agreement rather than from arithmetic: when night hours start and stop, what counts as a weekend, how many hours before overtime, and at what multiple. Two people can be equally honest and produce different totals from the same shifts if they assume different thresholds, and that is what most timesheet disputes actually are.

So write the thresholds down where the timesheet is kept, and keep the breakdown rather than the total. When somebody queries a payslip, the answer is a line of the split (eleven night hours rather than nine), and that is a conversation that ends. A total with no working behind it is one that goes on.

Nothing is uploaded, which for hours attached to a named person is the right default; everything stays in this browser until you export it, so export and keep it with the payroll record. Nearby: ROSTER builds the rota the hours come from, TACHO checks a driver's hours against the rules, LEAVE keeps entitlement in hours rather than days so part-time balances come out right, and LEDGER is where the money lands.