How working time is calculated: ordinary hours, overtime & authorised time

What this guide covers

This is the complete, authoritative explanation of how myWork turns clock scans into paid time — the model behind every hours screen. It covers how your week is measured, what authorised, unauthorised and declined hours mean, how overtime is calculated and rated, how weekends, public holidays and leave are treated, and when each kind of pay is paid.

Two shorter guides sit on top of this one: My Hours: your hours and pay, how it works (the employee summary) and Manage hours: authorise and decline your team's time (what a manager does). Read this when you want the full picture of why the numbers come out the way they do.

The one big idea: the week is the unit

myWork does not judge each day on its own. It adds up your whole week (Monday to Sunday) and compares the total against your weekly ordinary hours — the hours your schedule contracts you to work. A quiet day and a long day in the same week balance out. What matters is whether the week's total lands on your contracted hours.

The ideal is to land exactly on contract: not under (which is a deduction) and not over (which becomes paid overtime). Overtime is a weekly result, worked out when the week closes — it is never "time past the end of one shift".

There is one exception to the balancing, and it matters: weekend and public-holiday work never balances a short week. See the premium-day rule below.

The vocabulary (what each word means)

• Working (worked) hours — the time your clock-ins actually recorded.
• Ordinary hours — your contracted weekly hours, reduced for paid leave and public holidays. This is the baseline your week is measured against.
• Authorised hours — worked time within your schedule, plus any beyond-schedule time a manager has approved. Only authorised hours count toward ordinary and overtime.
• Unauthorised hours — beyond-schedule time a manager has not yet decided on, plus any overtime trimmed by the weekly cap. Shown for transparency; it pays nothing until it is authorised.
• Declined hours — beyond-schedule time a manager refused. Recorded and never paid. A decline can only be undone by a manager's explicit Revert decline action, which requires a written reason.
• Overtime — on an overtime-eligible schedule: authorised hours beyond the weekly ordinary, rated by the day they fell on.
• Extra hours — on a schedule that does not allow overtime: hours over ordinary are shown but unpaid (never overtime).
• Shortfall — hours you fell short of your weekly ordinary — deducted unless made up in the same week on ordinary working days.

Authorised, unauthorised and declined: the three states of extra time

Your ordinary scheduled hours pay automatically — you do nothing. But any time worked beyond your schedule never pays automatically. It starts life as unauthorised and waits for a manager to decide:

• Approve — the time becomes authorised: it is paid, and it feeds the weekly overtime tally once your week passes the ordinary contract.
• Approve part… — the manager can authorise only part of the extra time. This needs an explicit amount and a written reason why the employee is not getting the full amount; the remainder stays visibly pending — it is never silently written off.
• Decline — the time is written off as declined: it is not paid. A decline stands unless a manager deliberately uses Revert decline… (with a required reason), which returns the minutes to pending for a fresh decision.
• Mark reviewed — on the Weekly Review screen only, and only for a short (under-schedule) day. It acknowledges the day so it drops off the manager's to-do list. It does not add the missing hours back, so the shortfall is still deducted.

That is why it pays to agree any significant extra hours with your manager before working them — approving overtime is their call.

The 15-minute rule: what can become overtime at all

Before any beyond-schedule minutes reach the pending bucket, each day is checked against the schedule's minimum overtime increment (15 minutes by default, set per work schedule):

• Clock-out is what counts — on a normal day, extra time only triggers if you clocked out more than the minimum past your shift end. Starting early and leaving on time does not create overtime.
• Missing clock-out — when there is no clock-out scan, the check falls back to minutes worked above the day's target.
• Custom-schedule day — the manager has already agreed non-standard hours, so every minute beyond the base target counts, early start included.
• Sub-minimum excess is trimmed — a pending excess smaller than the minimum increment (8h14 on an 8h day, for example) is written off automatically at the weekly close on overtime-eligible schedules while the trim is switched on. It reappears if a later punch correction grows it past the minimum.

There is no weekly minimum on top of this. Once a day's extra minutes are authorised, every authorised minute beyond the weekly ordinary is overtime, even if that is only ten minutes.

How the weekly overtime calculation works

When a week closes, the system:

• Works out your ordinary target = your contracted weekly hours, reduced by paid leave and by public holidays not worked. So leave and holidays automatically lower the bar before any overtime can start.
• Fills the week Monday to Sunday with each day's authorised minutes from your scheduled working days. While the running total is below the target, those minutes are ordinary (paid at the normal rate).
• Once the running total reaches the target, every further authorised minute is overtime, attributed to the day it fell on and rated by that day (see the rates below).

The premium-day rule. Authorised work on a day that is not in your working pattern — a rest-day Saturday or Sunday, or any public holiday — never fills ordinary. It is overtime in full, at that day's rate, even if your weekday hours were short. A weekend shift can never be quietly absorbed at ×1 to plug a weekday gap, and equally it never erases a weekday shortfall — the gap stays a shortfall.

The only weekend that fills ordinary is a contracted one: if your schedule genuinely rosters you on Saturdays (a six-day pattern), that Saturday is an ordinary working day like any other.

Unauthorised minutes count toward neither ordinary nor overtime — they are invisible to pay until a manager authorises them.

Worked example

Your contract is 40 hours, Monday to Friday.

• You work 8 hours Monday–Thursday but only 6 on Friday (38h, all authorised): the week is 2 hours short — a shortfall, deducted unless you make it up on another weekday that same week.
• Same week, you also work an authorised 4 hours on Saturday: the Saturday is a rest day, so all 4 hours are overtime at ×1.5. The weekday shortfall of 2 hours remains and is still deducted. The Saturday does not fill it.
• Different week: Monday–Thursday 8h each, Friday 10h, all authorised. The first 8 Friday hours complete the 40; the last 2 are weekday overtime at ×1.5, attributed to Friday.

If any of those extra hours were never authorised by a manager, they stay unauthorised and earn nothing until they are approved.

Overtime rates

Overtime is rated by the kind of day each overtime hour fell on. These are the myWork defaults (aligned to the BCEA); HR can change the multipliers under HR → Pay Rate Categories.

• Ordinary scheduled hours — ×1.0
• Overtime on a weekday — ×1.5
• Saturday / rest day worked — ×1.5
• Sunday worked — ×2.0
• Public holiday worked — ×2.0

The weekly overtime cap

There is a hard cap on paid overtime per Monday–Sunday week. The default is the BCEA limit of 10 hours (600 minutes). Since 28 August 2026 HR can lower it on the attendance policy settings (the Weekly OT cap (min) field on the pay-rate configuration page); it can never be set above 600 minutes.

The cap trims what is paid. When a day's approved or pending overtime would take the week past the cap, the minutes over the cap are removed from the approved and pending buckets and moved to unauthorised, the day is flagged as a discrepancy with the reason "Weekly OT cap reached — BCEA limit 10h/week (…m moved to unauthorized)", and a Weekly OT cap exceeded warning is raised on the Alerts screen. Overtime past the cap is therefore not paid, even if a manager approved it.

The system also stops planning past the limit: a custom-schedule request that would push your week beyond the cap is refused at submission.

Public holidays

• Public holiday on your scheduled working day, not worked — paid your scheduled hours at ×1, automatically (no manager action), and it counts toward your week's ordinary hours.
• Public holiday worked — the hours you work are overtime at ×2.
• Public holiday on a rest day — nothing unless you work it (then it is paid at ×2).

Leave and the weekly target

Leave lowers your ordinary target, so a planned day off is never treated as a shortfall:

• A paid leave day (annual, sick, and so on) removes that day's scheduled hours from the target — you are not expected to make them up, and leave is paid separately.
• Half-day (partial) leave removes half the day.
• A public holiday not worked is excluded from the target (see above).
• Unpaid leave also lowers the target (so there is no phantom shortfall or overtime), but those hours are not paid — they are the dockable amount shown under Leave for payroll.

When you fall short

If your week's worked hours land below your ordinary target on completed working days, the gap is a shortfall and is deducted — unless you make it up within the same week, on ordinary working days (weekend or holiday work does not plug it; see the premium-day rule). On the manager and HR screens this rolls into a figure called Missing: scheduled hours not worked and not paid, net of any overtime or extra work elsewhere in the period. Unpaid leave is not part of Missing — it was approved, so it is reported separately under Leave.

Missing is different from unauthorised: unauthorised time is extra hours waiting for approval (or trimmed by the weekly cap), while missing time is hours you did not work.

Overtime-eligible vs "extra hours"

Whether beyond-ordinary time can ever become paid overtime depends on your schedule's overtime policy:

• Overtime-eligible schedule — authorised hours over the weekly ordinary become overtime, rated as above.
• Overtime not allowed — hours over ordinary are shown as extra hours: they need no authorisation and are never paid. (This is common for salaried or exempt roles.) Manager-approved holiday or rest-day overtime on such a schedule still counts toward, and is trimmed by, the weekly cap.

When it is paid: payroll periods

Normal pay and overtime run on different cycles:

• Normal (ordinary) pay follows the calendar month.
• Overtime follows the cut-off cycle set on your pay group (Payroll → Pay Groups), for example the 26th to the 25th — not the calendar month.

Overtime is paid in whole Monday–Sunday weeks. A week that straddles the cut-off is not split: its overtime is deferred in full to the next run, which is why the overtime dates on a payslip can differ from the salary period printed on it. Until a week has fully elapsed its overtime shows as provisional; once the week has closed it is final.

Before the weekly model started (8 June 2026) earlier days are recorded only — no beyond-ordinary hours are calculated or authorised for them.

Corrections and trust in the numbers

• Every approval, partial approval, decline and revert is audited — who, when and why are recorded on the day.
• Approving or cancelling weekend/holiday overtime updates the week's figures immediately, not at the next weekly close.
• Weeks that have been paid are frozen: nothing recomputes them.
• A nightly consistency check verifies that every week's stored pay figures still match its underlying days, and alerts HR if anything drifts.
• A day whose classification was stamped wrongly in the past (for example marked a working day when it was a rest day) can only be fixed by a manager's explicit, audited Correct day classification… action — schedule changes never silently rewrite history.

The daily statuses you will see

Each day carries a status badge — Present, Late arrival, Left early, Short day, On leave, Rest day, Public holiday, and so on. For what each badge means and where it appears, see Attendance status field definitions.

Where this shows up

• Employees — My Hours: your hours and pay, how it works, and the My Hours screen.
• Managers — Manage hours: authorise and decline your team's time, where you approve or decline beyond-schedule time before payroll.
• HR — Hours Analytics and Employee hours for HR (read-only pay numbers), and Schedule Management (HR) (schedules, public holidays, scan sync).

Related guides

• My Hours: your hours and pay, how it works — the short employee version.
• Manage hours: authorise and decline your team's time — the manager actions.
• Manage schedules: set your team's working pattern — sets the ordinary hours this model measures against.
• Attendance status field definitions — the day-status badges.
• Clock in and out remotely — how the worked hours are captured in the first place.