Payroll starts with an hour count, and an hour count that is wrong makes everything after it wrong. The tools in this group do the first step: they turn clock-in and clock-out times into hours worked, take off unpaid breaks, apply rounding if your policy uses it, and show what the week comes to before any pay is worked out. They are written for the person who runs payroll at a business with a few employees to a few dozen: an owner, an office manager or a bookkeeper.
The timesheet calculator is the main tool here. You enter start and finish times for each day, with as many unpaid breaks as the shift had, and it adds the hours. Shifts that cross midnight are counted from the start day to the finish day without you splitting them by hand. Because overtime under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act is counted per workweek, the calculator shows each week on its own, even when you load fourteen days. It never nets a long week against a short one. A biweekly period of 45 hours and 35 hours is 80 hours in total and still includes 5 hours of overtime in the first week.
Rounding is a place where small businesses get into trouble, so the calculator explains the rule it follows. The federal regulation on rounding, 29 CFR 785.48, allows an employer to round to the nearest five minutes, the nearest tenth of an hour or the nearest quarter hour, as long as the practice averages out so that employees are fully paid for all the time they actually work. The calculator lets you choose none, 5, 6, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, and it tells you when a choice leans one way. A rule of thumb that always rounds in the employer’s favour is not what the regulation describes.
The military time converter belongs here because rotas, security logs and hospital and warehouse schedules are often written on the 24-hour clock. It converts in both directions, says each time aloud the way it is spoken, and handles the letter codes for time zones. It is useful when you are reading a schedule someone else wrote and need the hours to enter into a timesheet.
Neither tool replaces your own records. The Department of Labor expects employers to keep accurate time records, and a calculator on a web page is not a record. Use these to check an hour count, to prepare figures to enter into your payroll software, or to explain a total to an employee. Keep the source records your state and the federal rules require.
Both tools run in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, and there is nothing to sign up for. Each page lists its sources, shows the date the rules were last checked and says what the tool does not do. State rules can be more generous to employees than federal rules and they change, so check your own state’s labor department before you rely on a figure for a pay run. If you spot a mistake, the contact page has a form for reporting it, and corrections are listed publicly.
If you are not sure where to start, begin with the timesheet calculator. Enter a week, look at the weekly total and the overtime line, then move on to the overtime and pay tools in the next group if the week crosses forty hours.