Time card template

What is in the Excel template

One sheet, one week. At the top you type the employee's name, the week's first day and the hourly rate. Below is a row for each day with two In and two Out columns: start, out for lunch, back from lunch, finish.

• Hours per day fill in by themselves, from both work periods. A shift past midnight, like 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM, counts as 8 hours.
• Dates fill in from the week's first day.
• Total, regular and overtime hours appear at the bottom, with overtime as every hour over 40.
• Gross pay is regular hours times the rate plus overtime hours times 1.5 times the rate.

Type times the way Excel reads them, like 8:05 AM or 16:30. A time typed as plain text, like "8.05", will not add up.

What a time card template must include

A time card is a payroll record, so it should hold what the law asks you to keep. Under the federal recordkeeping rule (29 CFR 516.2), an employer keeps, among other things, for each worker paid by the hour:

• the employee's full name, as used for Social Security
• the time and day the workweek begins
• the hours worked each workday and the total for each workweek
• the regular hourly rate and the overtime pay for the week
• total wages for the pay period and the date paid

The template covers the hours, the rate and the pay. Keep the rest in your payroll system. Some states ask for more: California wants the start and end of each work period and of each meal period recorded, which is why the template has two In and Out pairs a day.

When a spreadsheet is not enough

The template uses the federal rule: overtime only after 40 hours in a week. That is right for most states, and wrong in a few:

• In California, Alaska and Nevada (for workers under $18.00 an hour), hours over 8 in a day are overtime too. California also has double time over 12 hours and a 7th day rule.
• In Colorado, hours over 12 in a day are overtime.
• In California, a missing or late meal break owes an extra hour of pay that no column here shows.

Formulas for those rules get long and break easily when someone edits a cell. For those states, type the week into the time card calculator or the overtime calculator, which apply each rule and show the result.

A template for every employee

Save a copy of the file per person, or add a sheet per person in the same workbook by copying the first one. Keep the original blank. For more than a handful of employees, retyping every card each week adds up to hours. Run payroll reads photos of paper cards instead and produces the hours file for Gusto or QuickBooks.

Keeping records

Keep each finished time card for at least 2 years and the payroll records built from it for at least 3, under federal rules. Store them where you can find a single week quickly; that is what a wage claim or an audit asks for. In California, time records are kept for 3 years.