Free Time Card Calculator Available

For those people who just need to manually record a single weeks worth of time card information we created our free timecard hour calculator. This handy online timesheet can be used to enter the time you arrive for work, the time you leave, and the number of hours you take for breaks during the day. The free time clock calculator then automagically totals up the hours you worked for each weekday and the total number of hours worked for the week (as well as the total number of break hours you took for the week). The weekly time card can then easily be printed from within your browser to give to your payroll department or even out to a PDF file for emailing.

If you need to record your time more robustly and automatically you should try out Time Clock MTS, time clock software that can be used on one or many computers inside your company to track your time and attendance information.

Version 3.1.8 Released

I’ve just uploaded Version 3.1.8 of Time Clock MTS. This new version includes a couple of bug fixes, some new debug code to try to track down an issue a few users are having, and a couple of minor feature changes. The detailed changes can be found below:

  • A number of modifications have been made to the logging code including adding a time stamp to all log entries and logging the windows version (and service pack).
  • Users have been reporting an Error 52 (File not Found) when starting the software. Usually this is a permissions issue but it doesn’t seem to be this time. I’ve re-ordered the initialization code to try to catch where the error is happening and also put in some better error handling to at least give a more verbose message when the error fires.
  • Fixed a calculation error for salaried employees with a yearly salary period.
  • Fixed a problem with the Switch Jobs screen that could sometimes result in a clock out and clock in having exactly the same event time.
  • Employees clocked in with an OTHER time classification now have a purple status icon on the employee list screen (similar to those currently clocked in on vacation or sick time).
  • Automatic breaks are no longer applied to sick or vacation time.

The Always Pay Salary Setting

The Payroll Information Screen

The Payroll Information Screen

Above you can see the Payroll Information screen which defines various settings pertaining to the payroll for the selected employee. In the Salaried Payments section is an innocuous checkbox, Always Pay Salary. When checked this setting means that Time Clock MTS will always pay your employees their calculated salary for a reporting period regardless of the hours worked during the reporting period. The reason I am blogging about this today is that 3 times in the last week Time Clock MTS users have emailed me concerned about apparent calculation errors in the software that were in fact entirely correct due to the Always Pay Salary setting being turned on. It’s best to look at an example to explain exactly how the software makes it’s calculations.

Setting up a Weekly Salaried Employee

Setting up a Weekly Salaried Employee

First, let’s set up an employee to be paid a weekly salary. You can see the Payroll Information screen above for this sort of setup. The employee has the Payment Type set to Salary, the Salary Period to Weekly and the Salary / Period to $1000. Note that the Always Pay Salary setting is checked. We’ll go the Payroll Reports screen and run a Punchcard Report for a week (7 days) and check the results.

Punchcard Report with Always Paid Salary Setting Turned On

Punchcard Report with Always Paid Salary Setting Turned On

Above you can see a punchcard report run for the week June 6 to June 12. The employee has worked 34 hours for the week. Note that the report is showing a Total Work Time of 40 hours. However, below this is another value, Salary Work Time which is 34 hours. The first value is the calculated salaried hours, which in this case is the reporting period (one week) or 40 hours. If the report was run for 2 weeks the calculated salaried hours would be 80 hours, three weeks 120 hours and so on. The “Salary Work Time” value is the actual hours worked during the reporting period. The Total Work Time value is used for payroll calculations, so in this example the employee would be paid $1000 despite only working 34 hours for the week.

Now let’s turn off the Always Pay Salary setting and run the same report for the same time period.

Punchcard Report with Always Paid Salary Setting Turned Off

Punchcard Report with Always Paid Salary Setting Turned Off

In this case you can see that the Total Work Time is the same value as the Salary Work Time, or 34 hours. This number will then be used for all salary calculations.

Conclusions

It may seem a little odd that the Always Pay Salary setting gives these sorts of results but in practice this is exactly how many work places pay their salaried employees. For example, monthly salaried employees would get paid 12 equal amounts each year, despite the different number of work days in a month. Similarly weekly salaried employees would get the same pay week in and week out regardless of overtime worked. The numbers can seem a little odd but once you understand what is happening it all becomes quite clear. Time Clock MTS can thus easily be used to monitor the attendance of salaried employees while still calculating the correct payment amounts for them, regardless of the actual hours they work.