We all have the same 24 hours in the day — so the saying goes. Except, perhaps, when we’re talking about HR teams scrambling to manage the time tracking needs of a growing workforce.
That’s where those 24 hours can often get a little…squiggly. Days spent poring over spreadsheets totting up weekly totals. Time lost going cross-eyed trying to add up decimal hours into something meaningful.
Don’t worry — we’ve got you. Our free time card calculator will help you make sense of the numbers quickly and accurately so you can get on with what you do best: supporting your employees to perform at their best.
What is a Time Card Calculator?
Time cards are great for keeping a running tally of employee total hours and viewing big picture trends of your workforce. But the catch is that HR teams are often left wading through a whole heap of timesheets, totting up and logging employees’ total hours as they go. In larger workforces, that’s a huge time spend.
A time card calculator can help you manage employees’ day-to-day schedules, track start and end times, and automatically calculate total hours worked across a given time period.
They’re especially helpful for workforces with a large contingent of employees on an hourly rate, like retail or hospitality, where schedules, availability, and staffing requirements can change quickly.
Our employee time card calculator template is a free, simple-to-use tool that gives you a snapshot of your employees’ working hours without the need to wade through a bunch of Excel spreadsheets.
We designed this to help you:
- Calculate employees’ total hours worked in a given workweek
- Adjust hours and days worked according to shift patterns and roster
- Track start times, end times, and breaks across a seven day period
- Simplify employee scheduling and payroll workflows
How to Use a Time Card Calculator
A time card calculator is a tool that’s designed to provide an overview of employee work time, total pay, overtime, and break deductions based on your data input — making pay and time tracking more consistent and transparent.
Here’s how it works:
- Input employee total hours worked for each day: Enter clock-in and clock-out times, accounting for any partial or decimal hours as needed. Set the workweek length depending on how you operate — so if your team works weekends, make sure these are captured accurately.
- Input break time taken each day: Record any unpaid breaks, and the time card calculator will automatically apply break deductions as stipulated in your employees’ contracts.
- View hours worked and pay: The calculator will tally up regular hours and display a total that teams can use to support payroll processes, scheduling, and employee timesheet approval.
Key Adjustments for Overtime, Compliance, and Workforce Variability
Simple calculators can streamline complex time tracking data and help HR teams manage employee pay more effectively. But an HRIS built for modern teams, like Lattice, is configured according to the exact needs of your team and workforce. Here are a few things Lattice can do that would be awfully complicated in a spreadheet or online calculator:
- Overtime and break compliance: Set workweek hours according to labor laws and legal requirements and flag potential overtime. Then, adjust your calculations in line with your organization’s overtime rate multipliers and unpaid break deductions.
- Multi-location workforces: Make sure your time card calculator is set up to cope with time zone differences, differing regional guidance on workweek length, and location-based pay adjustments. This might include paid or unpaid breaks, overtime pay, and other local compliance standards. As an example, California overtime law states that employees are entitled to overtime pay after eight hours of working, but Texas overtime law follows the Fair Labor Standards Act, so it’s calculated once employees have hit a 40-hour week.
- Shift-based workforces: Shift-based timesheets often carry a higher level of complexity, due to differing shift lengths, rotating shift patterns, and practices around night shifts, weekend work, and split shifts. Make sure your time card setup accounts for these differences, including minimum rest periods, variable pay structures, and industry-specific requirements.
- Freelancers, contractors, and contingent workforces: If your organization works with freelancers, contractors, or other non-salaried workers, your time card calculator should include a way of logging variable billable hours and project-specific work. It should also account for local labor laws where relevant — the UK’s IR35 law, for example, sets specific thresholds for off-payroll working that limit total hours.
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Why Time Cards Still Matter for HR Teams
Time cards are an effective way for organizations to track employees’ work hours over the course of a week. But for HR teams, they’re also data that helps you diagnose if your current setup is working, and where the pressure points are.
They’re a warning sign that employees could be feeling overworked, with too many hours on the clock. They’re a record of who’s showing up where and when — meaning HR can support and resource the business better.
Most of all, they’re a gut check that your employment practices are fair and compliant.
When implemented effectively, they offer the following benefits:
- Ensure accurate pay: A 2022 study by EY found that the average organization has an 80% payroll accuracy rate. Time cards are a reliable way of tracking when employees clock in and out of work, as well as logging overtime, lunch breaks, and time off. This means that when it comes to payday, HR has accurate data to ensure employees are paid the correct number of hours, at the correct pay rate.
- Improve employee scheduling and labor distribution: Using time cards can help HR teams spot trends and patterns in their current setup — for example, if there are big spikes in overtime hours or inefficient scheduling. This helps teams proactively adjust staffing plans, reallocate resources, and manage payroll more efficiently.
- Create a paper trail: Every hour that goes untracked means an employee could be underpaid — or a compliance issue goes unnoticed. Time tracking provides both employees and HR with a fair, transparent way to resolve pay disputes and verify hours worked.
- Track and support your contingent workforce: When working with freelancers or contractors, using timesheets or time cards helps organizations keep track of billable hours and project-based work, ensuring accurate invoicing and payroll processing.
- Stay in step with legal requirements: Nobody wants their workforce to end up overworked or underpaid — and falling short on labor law compliance can have some serious consequences. Time cards help HR teams ensure compliance around break times, overtime, and total hours worked — creating a system that keeps employee welfare at its core.
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📈 Need help with other core HR metrics?
Plug your numbers into our free employee retention and turnover calculators:
🔎 Need to brush up on essential HR compliance?
Check out these two resources:
Streamline Time Tracking and HR Operations with Lattice
Templates like our time card calculator can be a great tool for lean HR teams looking to get their HR operations in order. But they often require manual updates, and scale inconsistently. Without the right infrastructure and workflows to underpin them, they become challenging to manage as your organization grows.
Lattice HRIS can help you build on your progress and move beyond templates, helping you to build a more streamlined HR function:
- Automate high-volume repetitive tasks, such as time tracking, timesheet approvals, and policy sharing.
- Build smart workflows to address key processes, like onboarding and payroll.
- Standardize policies and processes like time card calculators across the organization.
- Track processes, actions, and acknowledgements across different stakeholders and departments.
From time tracking to payday, onboarding to exit, Lattice creates a centralized source of truth for HR, managers, and employees. Find out more by booking a demo.
