Weekly Time Card Reconciler

A time card feels like a fact. It is printed, stamped and filed by someone in an office. Yet it is only one record of the week, and it can be wrong in ways nobody notices until the pay arrives short.

Why your own record is worth keeping

The federal rules expect more than one way of keeping time. The Department of Labor’s recordkeeping fact sheet says employers may use any timekeeping method they choose: a time clock, a timekeeper, or workers who write their own times on the records. Any plan is acceptable as long as it is complete and accurate. The same sheet lists what an employer must keep for each nonexempt worker, including the time and day the workweek begins, the hours worked each day and the total hours each workweek. Time cards, the records on which wages are computed, should be kept for two years. Nobody requires a worker to keep a notebook, which is exactly why one is useful.

Timesheets are old tools. They came into use in the nineteenth century as time books, and the cards stamped by a time clock can serve as one. Reconciliation is the accountant’s word for checking them. In accounting it means making sure that two sets of records agree, the way a careful household compares a bank statement with its own receipts. Hours work the same way. A second record does not replace the first; it gives the first something to be checked against.

The point is not suspicion. Most differences are small and honest. But a small difference repeats every shift, and a week has many shifts.

How two records of the same week drift apart

The first source of drift is the clock itself. The regulation on time clocks accepts the long-standing practice of recording starting and stopping times to the nearest 5 minutes, or to the nearest tenth or quarter of an hour, provided that over a period of time it does not fail to pay employees for all the time they actually worked. The same section says minor differences between clock records and actual hours cannot ordinarily be avoided, while major discrepancies should be discouraged because they cast doubt on the records. A worker who arrives at 07:53 and leaves at 16:34 may see 08:00 and 16:30 on the card. Eleven minutes are gone, perhaps returned on another day, perhaps not.

The second source is an automatic meal deduction. A record can take thirty minutes off every shift on the assumption that a meal was taken. The rule on meals says a bona fide meal period is not worktime, is ordinarily 30 minutes or more, and requires the worker to be completely relieved from duty. An office worker who must eat at the desk is working while eating, and the hours worked fact sheet gives the same example of someone who answers the telephone over lunch. Five shifts with a deduction and no real meal remove two and a half hours from the week.

Short breaks are a third source. Rest periods running from 5 minutes to about 20 minutes are common in industry, are customarily paid, and must be counted as hours worked. They may not be offset against other working time either. A break of 5 to 20 minutes belongs on the paid side of the ledger. A record that subtracts a 15 minute break is not rounding. It is removing paid time.

Night work causes a quieter kind of drift. Shift work covers long-term night shifts as well as rotating schedules, and a night shift belongs to one working night even though it touches two dates. A shift from 22:00 to 06:30 may be stored by one system as a single entry and by another as two pieces split at midnight. Compared date by date, the two records then look nothing alike: one shift ends six and a half hours early, and a phantom shift appears the next morning. Compared by overlapping time, the pieces line up with the single shift and the difference vanishes. Matching by overlap rather than by date is the honest way to compare shift work.

Clock changes add another wrinkle. In autumn the clock repeats an hour and in spring it skips one, so a calendar day is no longer always 24 hours long. On the night of 1 November 2026 in New York, a shift from 22:00 to 06:30 shows eight and a half hours on the wall clock but lasts nine and a half.

Software handles this with the time zone database kept at IANA, which records the history of local time for many places and is updated when governments change their rules. Browsers expose it through the timeZone option of Intl.DateTimeFormat. The rules really do move: the October 2026 release notes that Cuba will not fall back on 1 November.

What the federal rules say about the workweek

Overtime is counted per workweek, and the workweek is not the calendar week. The regulation defines it as a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods, which may begin on any day and at any hour. Once its start is set, it stays fixed whatever schedule is actually worked. The recordkeeping rule likewise treats a workday as any fixed period of 24 consecutive hours. That fixed boundary matters whenever a shift crosses it. A shift from 20:00 on Tuesday to 04:00 on Wednesday, in a workweek starting at Wednesday midnight, falls wholly in the earlier week if it is counted where it starts, or four hours in each if it is split at the boundary.

The overtime fact sheet states the core rule plainly. Covered employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at not less than time and one half their regular rate, and averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. A fortnight of 30 hours followed by 50 hours contains ten overtime hours, never zero. An agreement that only 40 hours a week will be counted does not change that either.

Time and a half dates from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, passed during the Great Depression. It was meant as a penalty on the employer, to spread work across more people, rather than a bonus for the worker.

The forty-hour line is a legal threshold more than a description of real weeks. Since the middle of the twentieth century the American working week has traditionally run Monday to Friday for forty hours, yet many people work longer.

How to price an hours difference

Pricing begins with the regulation’s own illustration for a worker paid a single hourly rate. At 12 an hour, a 46-hour week is paid as 46 hours at 12 plus 6 hours at 6, because overtime adds one half of the rate for each hour over 40 on top of the straight-time earnings. Suppose the worker’s own record shows 46 hours and the employer’s shows 44. The straight-time difference is 2 hours at 12, which is 24. The overtime difference is also 2 hours, 6 against 4, priced at half the rate, which adds 12. The gap is exactly 36. Adding the two overtime hours again at the full time-and-a-half rate would count them twice.

That arithmetic holds only for one hourly rate. Bonuses, piece rates and salaries change the regular rate itself, so a regular rate calculation has to come first.

Exactness matters more than it seems. Four minutes is one fifteenth of an hour, which no decimal shows exactly. Working in whole seconds and exact fractions, and rounding only the final amount to cents with the rule stated, keeps two people from arguing over a cent that came from the method rather than from the hours.

Settling it on paper

Once the differences are listed, each can be read in plain terms. This start moved seven minutes. This meal was deducted on a day worked through. This Friday is missing from one record. Each carries the rule it touches. Some will be mistakes in the worker’s notes and some in the employer’s system, and the list itself does not decide which. It shows where the records disagree and by how much, so the conversation can be about facts instead of impressions.

Then both people mark each item agreed or disputed, and sign. A pay stub shows the gross wages for the period and the deductions taken from them, so the hours behind it are where any correction starts. Both records can be kept as plain CSV, the comma-separated format described in RFC 4180, which any spreadsheet program opens. A signed sheet listing both totals and every agreed correction is a better record than either card alone.

The method has limits worth saying out loud. It restates federal rules only. It does not decide whether the law covers a job, whether someone is exempt, or whether a rounding practice is lawful over time. It does not compute state or local rules, such as daily overtime or meal premiums, which differ from place to place. And it cannot tell a real meal from an interrupted one; only the people who were there know that.

What it can do is narrower and firmer: set two records side by side and account for every minute between them.