Small business time tracking is the Friday job of turning what each person on the crew wrote on the card into the hours you will actually pay for. You take the start and the finish, take the unpaid break off, turn the leftover minutes into decimal hours, add the days into a week, split the week at forty hours, and multiply by that person's rate. None of it is hard. It goes wrong when the sheet is a scrap of paper and the arithmetic gets done twice, once in your head on Friday and once again when someone queries the amount. The free weekly timesheet template on this site runs the whole week in one place: a row per day for each person, the break taken off, the overtime split out, the rate entered once, and regular pay, overtime pay and gross coming out at the bottom. It prints, and it costs nothing to use. The subscription keeps the finished sheet filed against the employee and the pay period, so the week you signed off in March still has an answer when someone asks for it in July.
Landscaping time tracking: one sheet for a crew of three
A landscaping outfit with a foreman and two laborers does not need a system, it needs one sheet that holds three people and seven days. Give every person a row per day with a start, a finish and the unpaid break, and put the rate at the head of their block. The week then adds down the column instead of across a pile of cards. Reading the same numbers off one page is what stops the two most common errors on a small crew: a day counted twice because a card was handed in late, and a break that was taken on site but never taken off the sheet.
The week worked through
One laborer starts at 7:30 and finishes at 4:15, with half an hour off for lunch. From 7:30 to 4:15 is 8 hours 45 minutes, which is 8.75 hours, and taking the half hour off leaves 8.25 hours for the day. Five days like that is 41.25 hours. At 22 dollars an hour, the first 40 hours are 880 dollars of regular pay. The 1.25 hours past 40 are paid at time and a half, so 22 dollars becomes 33 dollars an hour and those hours come to 41.25 dollars. Gross for the week is 921.25 dollars. That is the entire calculation, and the template does every line of it as you type the times in.
Where the overtime line falls
Under the federal rule cited below, overtime is owed on hours worked past 40 in a single workweek, and the workweek is a fixed and recurring period of seven consecutive days that you set and keep. It is not a calendar week unless you say it is, and it does not average across two weeks in a biweekly pay period. That matters on a crew that works six long days one week and three short ones the next: each week stands alone, so the long week owes overtime even though the pay period as a whole looks ordinary. Fix the start of your workweek once, write it at the top of the sheet, and the line never moves.
Keeping the sheet after the week is paid
The record is the part people skip, and it is the part that answers questions later. For every hourly employee you want the daily hours, the weekly total, the rate, the regular and overtime earnings and the pay period the sheet belongs to, kept together and kept for years rather than weeks. A shoebox of cards technically holds that and practically does not, because nobody can find one Tuesday in it. Saving each finished week against the employee and the pay period is what the paid product does, and it is why the export exists.
Questions people ask about small business time tracking
What is the simplest way to do small business employee time tracking?
One weekly sheet per person with a start, a finish, the unpaid break and the rate. The free weekly timesheet template on this site prints exactly that and totals it for you.
How do I turn 8 hours and 15 minutes into hours?
Divide the minutes by 60. Fifteen minutes is a quarter of an hour, so 8 hours 15 minutes is 8.25 hours, and that decimal is what you multiply by the rate.
Do I owe overtime to a two person crew?
The size of the business does not change the hours rule for a covered hourly employee: past 40 hours in the workweek, the hours are paid at time and a half of the regular rate.
How long do I keep the finished timesheets?
Keep the hours and earnings records for years, not weeks, and keep them per employee and per pay period so a question about one week in March can be answered from one place.