How overtime works
See how Clockspot applies your overtime rules to worked hours, separates each overtime tier, and presents the result in payroll reports.
Clockspot totals each employee's hours and classifies hours past your thresholds into overtime tiers. You set the rules in Overtime Rules. This page explains how they're applied so the numbers on your reports make sense.
The three rule types
- Weekly — hours over the threshold within one workweek (e.g. over 40) use the multiplier. Your Workweek start day on Workweek decides where the week begins.
- Daily — hours over the threshold within a single day (e.g. over 8) use the multiplier.
- Seventh day — hours worked on the seventh consecutive day of a workweek use the multiplier. A threshold of 0 applies it to all of that day's hours.
Each rule has a Threshold (hrs) and a Multiplier (1.5 for time-and-a-half, 2 for double time). You can have up to five.
Tiers and how rules combine
Rules of the same type stack into tiers. With a daily 1.5× over 8 and a 2× over 12, the hours between 8 and 12 land in the 1.5× tier and the hours past 12 land in the 2× tier.
The same worked minute is never assigned to two overtime tiers. When daily and seventh-day rules overlap, the higher multiplier wins. Weekly overtime is then figured from hours that have not already been classified by a daily or seventh-day rule.
Presets
A Preset — Federal, California, and several states — fills in a common set of rules as a starting point. Federal is simply weekly over 40 at 1.5×. Pick the closest preset and adjust, or build Custom rules.
Exemptions and changes
- An employee whose Exemption on Employee Pay is Exempt is left out of overtime entirely.
- Overtime reports use the current saved rules when they run. If you change rules and rerun an older report, the breakdown can change.
Where it shows up
Overtime appears, broken out per tier, on the Overtime and Payroll Summary reports.
Common questions
- An employee worked seven days but got no seventh-day overtime.
Seventh-day rules apply only when all seven days of the workweek have hours. A gap on any day means the seventh day is treated as a normal day.
- Can I set different overtime rules for different employees?
Rules are workspace-wide. For per-person control, mark an employee Exempt on Employee Pay to leave them out of overtime entirely.
Clockspot keeps clock-ins, corrections, approvals, and payroll-ready hours connected so owners and managers can review the workweek before payroll.
Want to simplify how your team tracks time? See how Clockspot works.