Overtime is work beyond the established norm: past the shift, past the weekly norm, or on a day off. Labour law limits how much of it is allowed and requires premium pay or, by agreement with the employee, additional rest. The exact rates and limits are set by the labour code and by internal policy.
Why overtime is an indicator, not just a cost
Persistent overtime in one unit almost always signals a planning error rather than diligence: an understaffed schedule, an unaccounted peak, or a manager covering a shortage of people with the hours of the people they have. The cost is double — premium pay now, plus fatigue and absenteeism next month.
So overtime is read together with absenteeism and turnover for the same site. Rising overtime and rising turnover in one unit are one problem, not two, and it is solved in the schedule rather than in motivation.
What it takes to calculate it correctly
The difficulty is not the rate but deciding what counts as overtime in the first place.
- The working-time norm for the accounting period — the excess is measured against it; under aggregated accounting that period is a month or a quarter, not a day.
- Actual hours must come from clock records, not from the schedule: a planned shift and a worked shift are different quantities.
- Initiation and approval: overtime should be an instruction, otherwise a dispute over paying for it is predictable.
- Statutory limits and internal caps — monitored before the fact, not in the month-end summary.
How this works in Verifix
Verifix compares actual records with the schedule and the period norm and separates out overtime, night hours and work on days off by itself. Pay for those is computed by configured rules and reaches the payroll sheet with everything else.
A manager sees overtime as a trend for their own unit instead of learning about it from the payroll sheet at month end. That is what makes it possible to fix the schedule before the overtime becomes permanent.
In short
Persistent overtime is a diagnosis of the schedule, not a measure of diligence. And it has to be computed from actual records, or a dispute over pay is inevitable.