Keep Track of Your Time: How to Calculate Hours and Minutes Worked

We can all agree that employees deserve to be compensated for their hard work.

But making sure they're paid fairly and according to their contracts involves a few moving parts that can be difficult to manage. In hourly positions or positions that pay extra for overtime, one of those parts that can be difficult to manage is ensuring that employees are paid up to the hour and minute of their work. .

How to calculate hours and minutes worked

Hours and minutes worked can be calculated via manual tracking, mechanical clocks, or time tracking automation tools. If calculating manually, convert minutes to a decimal by dividing total minutes worked by 60.

There are three methods by which you can calculate the hours and minutes worked by your employees. Manual tracking, mechanical clocks, automation tools, and time tracking software all have advantages and disadvantages depending on the size of your business and the type of tasks performed by your employees. Let's dive deeper into these methods.

Whatever your industry, these strategies will show you how to get an accurate read on when your employees should be paid. We'll walk you through some useful strategies you can use to calculate hours and minutes worked.

What is manual time tracking?

The first method you can use to track time is to manually sort your hours and minutes worked. To calculate payroll to the nearest minute, you must convert the minutes to a decimal number by dividing the total number of minutes worked by 60.

For example, if the total number of hours and minutes for a week is 42 hours and 28 minutes, you can divide 24 by 60 to get the decimal 0.4. Then you have your answer of 42.4 hours worked.

To calculate the salary earned during this work period, simply multiply 42.4 by the hourly rate. Simple, right?

However, when managing large teams, manually calculating these hours and minutes can be a huge waste of time for your business. The key to manual time tracking is knowing when it's best to use it based on the size of your team and the type of work that lends itself to more complex time tracking methods such as mechanical clocks or time tracking software.

How to use mechanical clocks

"Pick the clock" seems to have become an outdated notion of calculating hours and minutes worked in recent years. However, mechanical clocks are a more efficient option than manually calculating an employee's time.

A traditional mechanical clock will mark the time and date on an employee's paper time card when arriving at work and leaving. Then the timestamps on the paper time sheets are used to determine how much time the employee spent working.

While there is always a manual component involved in auditing accumulated times on time cards, mechanical clocks provide a consistent basis for knowing when an employee has started and finished work.

If you think you can handle the manual component of mechanical clock data management and can rely on your employees to consistently clock in and out (not to mention keep their cards and follow the rules honestly) a mechanical clock is a cost-effective option for tracking hours and minutes worked.

Implementation of automation tools

Of course, manual tracking can take up a lot of time that you might prefer to spend on other tasks. In these cases, it may be worth trying time tracking tools as your primary method of calculating hours and minutes of work. This fully automated software can be installed as a browser extension or additional application on employee computers to track the exact time they spend at work and need to be compensated. Some devices, such as Macbooks, have screen time tracking built in.

By keeping tabs on what employees are working on, you can measure the productivity of different employees working on different tasks. It will not only provide an answer as to how long your employees should be paid, but also provide key insights into their performance and the distribution of their days between tasks.

time tracking software

If doing everything manually seems like a daunting task, consider diving into digital tools that can make the time tracking process much smoother.

To be eligible for inclusion in the time tracking software category, a product must:

Integration with various accounting and payroll software Follow a...