Configuring your Overtime Settings
The Overtime Setup section of the Fingercheck Setup Wizard allows you to select a basic Overtime Policy to be set up for your employees. An Overtime Policy is a set of rules that dictate which hours on your employee time cards will be counted as Overtime Hours, instead of Regular Hours. Typically, Overtime Hours are paid out at a different rate than Regular Hours are, but their configurations can differ vastly, depending on factors such as your company's pay structure, or even some state laws.
When first setting up a Fingercheck company, you'll be asked to select from a list of pre-made suggestions, based on some commonly seen configurations. These are as follows.
Pay an overtime rate of 1.5 times the regular rate after working 40 hours a week: Simply put, if an employee works more than 40 hours in a given work week, all time after the 40 will be marked as "Overtime"- meaning their base pay rate will be increased by 1.5 times for that period.
Pay an overtime rate of 1.5 times the regular rate after working 8 hours a day: In this preset, if the employee works more than 8 hours on any given day, all time past that point will be marked "Overtime", and they'll be paid 1.5 times their normal rate for that time.
Pay an overtime rate of 2 times the regular rate after working 12 hours a day: This configuration, commonly referred to as "Double Time", grants employees who work past the 12 hour mark two times their normal pay rate for those hours.
Pay an overtime rate of 1.5 times the regular rate on the 7th consecutive day: This one sounds like it should be the same thing as the first preset, but it's not! The reason why is that this one will ONLY apply the 1.5 times pay rate to the 7th day in a row an employee works.
Pay an overtime rate of 2 times the regular rate after working 8 hours on the 7th consecutive day: Again, this one sounds similar to the 3rd preset, but it's not. This one ONLY applies the 2 times pay rate to the 7th day in a row the employee works, and ONLY after the 8th hour on that day.
Keep in mind that you're not restricted to just one selection, you can have multiple! For example, you can select the second and third presets to create a situation where any employee who works between 8-12 hours gets the 1.5x rate for that time, and if they go over 12, they'll get the 2x rate for that time.
If your business is located in California, you may recognize this as the configuration of rules used for the state of California's Overtime law.
Why does the wizard ask for the beginning of my work week? Why is this important?
Setting a start day for the week is so the system knows where to start calculating when determining how many hours have been worked within a week, which is important when figuring out Overtime, since most Overtime Policies trigger on "When an employee has worked X amount of hours, everything after is Overtime".
For example, if you have a weekly-based Overtime Policy, and Jan 1 is a Sunday, that means your work week is Jan 1st thru Jan 7th. If you set the beginning of the week to Sunday, the policy will know to take all hours worked within that week into calculation, but nothing after or before.
Now, take the same example but set the start of the week to Wednesday. Now the system will total up all hours between the days of Jan 4th thru Jan 11th.
This setting is not important if you have a Daily kind of Overtime structure, so in those situations, you can leave this setting alone 😃.
If you have any further questions on this subject, you can reach out to our team at 1-800-610-9501, or, use our in-app messaging feature by logging into our secure site and initiating a conversation.