Vacation Time and Overtime Calculations

I got an interesting email from a Time Clock MTS user today who had found an apparent overtime calculation error in the software.

I have set up our user with Vacation and Sick Accrual information as well as OT info. Basically, we have OT set for weekly over 40 hours and also set so that Vacation/Sick and Holiday DOES effect OT. When I ran the report for last week (with a vacation day included) the report ran information saying she had 40 hours Regular and 2.8 Hours OT. It shouldn’t show any OT calculation since she had 8.0 hours vacation. Can you please tell me why the report isn’t properly calculating. It should be 42.8 hours Regular time due to the Vacation.

I asked for and received their database so I could check their data and sure enough what they reported was correct. The reason for the apparent error was one innocuous setting. The “Sick/Vac Time Affect OT” setting was checked on the Tools->Options->Overtime Settings page. Unchecking this setting and saving the changes I re-ran the payroll reports and presto Time Clock MTS reported 42.8 hours of normal time. It’s worth a quick look at the effect of this setting.

  • In this case when the setting is turned on Time Clock MTS considers vacation time to be an active part of the work week. So, the overtime limit is set to 40 hours and all time (including vacation time) is compared with this limit. Hence, it reports 2.8 hours of overtime.
  • When the setting is turned off vacation time is ignored from the overtime calculation. So 34.8 hours is compared with the overtime limit of 40 hours (resulting in 34.8 normal hours) and then the 8 normal vacation hours is added onto this, resulting in 42.8 hours of normal time.

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