Automatic overtime
Book a person's hours past a daily cutover to their overtime labour code, without anyone doing sums.
Set a daily hours cutover against a team member and Tradie does the rest: once they pass it on a given day, every hour after that is booked to their overtime labour code instead of the one they picked. Nobody has to notice, remember, or work out where the line fell.
Turning it on
Overtime is set per person, on the Users screen, under their labour codes. Three settings, and the last two stay greyed out until the first is ticked:
| Setting | What it is |
|---|---|
| Auto overtime | The master switch for this person. Off, and nothing else here applies. |
| Overtime cutover (hours) | How many hours they work in a day before overtime starts |
| Overtime labour code | The code their overtime hours go to |
Ticking Auto overtime without a cutover above zero and an overtime labour code will not save. That is deliberate - a half-configured switch that silently does nothing is worse than one that tells you what it still needs.
What happens at the cutover
The hours are counted across the whole day, in the order the work was done, and the cutover is the point in that running total where overtime starts.
An entry that straddles the cutover is split in two: the hours up to the cutover stay on the code the person chose, and the hours past it go to the overtime code. Both are ordinary timesheet entries from then on - they submit, price and report exactly like any others.
The team member is told when it happens, on the save that causes it:
Overtime You have passed 8 hours for Monday 22/09. This entry has been split: 1.50 hours at LAB01 and 2.00 hours at your overtime code OT01.
That message names the cutover, the day and both halves in hours, because the question it has to answer is “why now, and how much?” - not simply that something happened.
The day is worked out fresh every time
The cutover belongs to the day, not to any one entry. So every time an entry on that day is saved or deleted, the whole day is worked out again from the start.
That matters when someone fixes up an earlier entry. Add an hour to the morning and the cutover moves earlier for everything after it - so an afternoon entry that was entirely normal time may now be partly overtime, and Tradie re-splits it rather than leaving the day quietly wrong.
It also means turning the feature off, or changing the cutover, un-does the split the next time that day is touched. Nothing compounds.
What counts, and what cannot change
- Lunch breaks are not counted. A break is already taken off the job entry’s hours, so counting it again would push someone over their cutover early.
- Admin jobs count. A day is a day - the running total is every entry, whatever it is booked to.
- Entries already sent to your accounting system count, but are never re-coded. Their hours are already on a job line out there. They still add to the day’s total, so the cutover falls in the right place, but Tradie will not reach back and change them.
Overriding one entry
Sometimes a particular stretch of overtime should go somewhere else. Change the labour code on an overtime row in the Timesheets screen and Save asks Override overtime?, naming the hours, the overtime code they are on and the code they will move to.
- Cancel leaves the row in edit mode and sends nothing.
- Override moves those hours, and that entry stops being re-coded. Its hours still count towards the day’s cutover - the work happened - but the day is never allowed to put them back.
An Auto Overtime button appears on an overridden row to hand it back, which re-works the day from scratch straight away. Entries already submitted cannot be overridden either way.
Only the office can do this, from the Timesheets screen. A team member saving on their phone is unaffected, and an edit that leaves the labour code alone is an ordinary save with no question.
This exists because of the rule above: the day is re-derived on every save, so before the question was added a changed labour code looked as though it had worked and then quietly reverted on the next save.
Where you see it afterwards
- On the team member’s Timesheet screen, overtime entries carry an Overtime marker.
- On the Scheduler’s Timesheets screen, the same marker sits alongside the lunch and service charge ones.
Everywhere else - submitting, your accounting system, the reports - they are simply two ordinary entries.
See also
- Users - where the three settings live.
- Labour codes - setting up the code overtime is booked to.
- Lunch breaks - the other thing that reshapes a day’s hours.
- Timesheets - reviewing time before it reaches payroll.