While reviewing an employee's time cards, you may notice the overall totals being slightly higher or lower than expected by a minute, such as an employee having 1:01 or 0:59 worked hours (1.01 or 0.99 worked hours). 

What is Happening?

When an employee's time punch reaches their time card on ExakTime Connect, the time punches are rounded to the nearest minute and help create the time record with the total minutes. When policies are applied to a time card to calculate reg/OT1/OT2 time, the total minutes are converted into decimals and added up. These conversions back and forth between minutes and decimals can result in rounding oddities that can be seen with an extra minute added or taken due to how minutes and decimals may not convert easily.

For example:

• An employee worked for 20 minutes, which is 1/3 of an hour, and .33 in decimals.
• The employee works another 40 minutes, which is 2/3 of an hour, and .66 in decimals.
• Adding up the decimal time of .33 and .66 would result in .99.
• The .99 total is correct, but the employee would be losing .01 of time for every 1 hour of work.

To help address this, we keep the totals in decimals and adjust them so they properly add up to the correct total. The errors you are seeing are not truly errors as the totals seen are corrections to ensure that the time rounds correctly match the time an employee should receive.

These totals can also be affected when being exported to accounting/payroll applications as the applications may apply their own roundings/formulas to the hours/minutes to match their own expectations. 

What Can I Do?

A recommended option to help address time total oddities would be to have an in/out time rounding to the nearest 3 or 15 minutes that allows employee time to convert between hours/minutes and decimals cleanly.

3 and 15 minutes can cleanly convert to decimals with 3 minutes converting into .05 of an hour and 15 minutes converting into .25 of an hour.

Clean conversions between minutes and decimals can help mitigate the chances of time total oddities where employees receive or lose a minute.