Timecard conversion: how to convert time to decimal

Do you ever spend endless hours manually calculating employee working hours and salaries, only to end up with confusing and potentially inaccurate results? You're not alone.

Converting scorecards can be a tricky process that consumes valuable time and resources for small businesses. In this article, we'll walk you through the steps of converting timecards, how to convert timecards to decimal, and provide tips and tricks to make the process more efficient.

We'll even introduce time tracking software that can automate the process for you.

What is Scorecard Conversion?

Scorecard conversion is the process of converting the hours and minutes worked by an employee into a format that can be used to calculate their salary.

Getting it right is important because you want to make sure employees are paid correctly, avoid clocking fraud, and make sure you're paying your team according to labor laws and company policies .

Examples of scorecard conversion:

If an employee worked 8 hours and 30 minutes, you must convert it to 8.5 hours in decimal form. This decimal form is what you would use to calculate the employee's salary based on their hourly wage.

Let's say another employee worked 7 hours and 45 minutes. To convert this to decimal form, you would divide minutes worked by 60, giving you 0.75. Then you would add that decimal to the total number of hours worked, giving you 7.75 hours.

This is the decimal form you would use to calculate their salary based on their hourly wage. And just like before, it's important to make sure the timecard conversion is accurate to ensure your employees are paid fairly and on time.

Some people do the scorecard conversion manually, but there are also tools like Homebase that can automate the process and make it more efficient.

How to convert time into pay Step 1. Calculate the total time worked

To do this, you can either use the actual working hours that your employee has recorded, or use rounded hours as defined by US federal law. If you are using actual working hours, you will need to add the hours and minutes separately and convert the remaining minutes to hours.

Remember to factor in lunch breaks and overtime. If you use rounded times, you'll need to round check-in and check-out times to the nearest quarter hour.

Use of actual hours

If you want to calculate the salary of your employees based on actual hours worked, you will need to collect the total number of hours and minutes worked during the pay period. You can find this information on their timesheet or employee time tracking system.

Let's say you have an employee who works 8 hours a day for 5 days a week and eats lunch at his desk, so he doesn't need to punch in for a lunch break. To calculate the total number of working hours, you will need to add the hours and minutes separately.

So for this employee, he worked 40 hours in total (8 hours per day x 5 days). But we also have to consider the minutes they worked. Let's say they worked 17, 27, 5, 14 and 10 minutes a day respectively. That's a total of 73 minutes for the week.

To convert those 73 minutes to hours, we need to divide by 60 (since there are 60 minutes in an hour). That leaves us with 1 hour and 13 minutes. If we add that to the 40 hours worked, we get a total of 41 hours and 13 minutes for the pay period.

Note: When calculating total working hours, remember to factor in lunch break and overtime.

Use rounded hours

As an employer, you can choose to round your employees' working hours to facilitate payroll calculations.

Under US federal law, you are permitted to round hours to the nearest quarter. This means that each quarter consists of 15 minutes and you will need to adjust your rounding accordingly.

Here's an example: Say you have an employee who arrives at 9:03 a.m. and leaves at 5:25 p.m., without taking a lunch break. In reality, they worked 8 hours and 22 minutes that day.

But when you round off their time, you'll need to round the arrival time up to 9:00 a.m., because it's less than eight minutes after the quarter hour. And you'll need to round the end time up to 5:30 p.m., because there are more than eight full minutes left after the previous quarter.

So even if the employee actually worked 8 hours and 22 minutes, you would round up to 8 hours and 30 minutes.

Remember that it is important to round up your employees...