When Your Workweek Crosses Payroll Periods

Most employers already know that the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) requires overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek, which consists of a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours (seven consecutive 24 hour periods). Employers are also not allowed to average the hours over two or more weeks, so you can't deny an employee overtime if they work 60 hours one week and only 20 the next week.

Since the workweek can be defined differently for each business, it's important to understand how Virtual TimeClock handles weekly overtime when a payroll period falls in the middle of your workweek. The good news is that the time clock calculates weekly overtime based on your defined workweek start day, regardless of your payroll frequency. This means if your workweek is from Monday to Sunday and the payroll period ends on Wednesday, the time clock is smart enough to know that next time it will have to include the hours from Monday and Tuesday when determining if the employee passed the weekly overtime threshold, even if those days were in the prior payroll period. You can change the day your workweek begins by turning on administration from the File menu, then going to Configure Time Settings.