Overtime & TOIL Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-31 is a working register of extra hours. You log each occasion someone works overtime — whether it is paid in money or banked as time off in lieu (TOIL) — and each occasion banked time is used. The tool costs the paid overtime by rate band, keeps a running TOIL balance per person, tracks spending against a monthly budget, and prints a summary you can hand to payroll or a manager.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so names, rates of pay and hours never leave the computer you are using. Pay data is confidential; a tool that keeps it local is the point.

Overtime, TOIL, and why they never mix

The register records three kinds of entry, and the distinction runs through every figure the tool produces:

• Overtime — paid. Extra hours settled in money. These are the only entries that have a cost.
• TOIL accrued. Extra hours worked but banked as time instead of pay. No money changes hands; the person's TOIL balance goes up.
• TOIL taken. Banked time used as leave. Again no money; the balance goes down.

Money and hours are different units, so the tool never adds them together. The overtime cost figures count paid entries only — a TOIL row shows a dash in the cost column, deliberately. The TOIL balance counts hours only. If you see a single number described as "total overtime", ask which unit it is in; here, every figure states its basis.

Recording an entry

One entry is one person, one date, one type. If someone worked late on Tuesday and Wednesday, that is two entries — keeping each day separate is what makes the monthly figures and the balance trustworthy. Enter hours as decimals: 90 minutes is 1.5, a quarter hour is 0.25.

The form pre-fills the base hourly rate from the default in Settings; change it on the entry for anyone on a different rate. The preview line under the form shows the arithmetic before you save — the cost of a paid entry, or the hours a TOIL entry will add to or remove from the balance — so a wrong band or a mistyped rate is visible before it is in the register.

The tool refuses a few combinations that would quietly corrupt the figures: paid overtime with no hourly rate, an entry of more than 24 hours, a rate band on TOIL taken (banked hours are used hour for hour — the multiplier was applied when the time was banked), and overtime dated in the future. Only TOIL taken can be booked ahead.

Rate bands and multipliers

The band records the premium at which the extra hours were worked:

• ×1.0 standard — plain rate, no premium.
• ×1.5 time and a half — a common premium for evenings or a first band of weekend working.
• ×2.0 double time — a common premium for the least sociable hours.

Which band applies to which hours is a matter for your contracts and your country's rules — the tool applies whatever you select and nothing else. The band matters for both settlement routes: paid overtime is paid at rate × multiplier, and where your policy banks TOIL at the enhanced rate, an hour worked at ×1.5 banks 1.5 hours of TOIL. If your policy banks TOIL hour for hour regardless of when it was worked, simply record TOIL accruals at the standard band.

How paid overtime is costed

The base rate is the per-hour figure before any premium. Six hours at a base rate of 17.25 on double time costs 6 × 17.25 × 2.0 = 207.00. The register shows the cost on each paid row, and every chart and table that mentions cost is built from this formula and nothing else.

Two things the cost figure deliberately does not include: TOIL of any kind, and employment on-costs — employer taxes, pension contributions, holiday accrual on overtime where that applies. If your finance team wants a fully loaded figure, apply their on-cost percentage to the totals here.

The TOIL balance

Accruals credit the balance at the multiplier in force when the time was worked; taking TOIL debits it hour for hour. The headline tile shows the net balance across whatever the current filter contains, and the per-employee table breaks it down per person.

Two honest limits to keep in mind. First, the balance counts only the entries in this register and the current filter — if you set a date filter, accruals and usage outside the range disappear from the balance, so clear the date filter before reading a balance as true. Second, there is no opening balance: time banked before you started using the tool is not in the figure unless you enter it as an accrual dated when it was earned.

The Settings tab has a "take within" number of days. It does not expire anything — it simply prints a use-by date in the entry preview when TOIL is banked, as a prompt. Many organisations require TOIL to be used within a set period; enter yours, and chase balances that are getting old.

The overtime budget

Set a monthly budget for paid overtime in Settings. The headline tile compares the paid cost in the current filter against the budget multiplied by the number of distinct calendar months that appear in the filtered entries — so a three-month view is compared against three months of budget, and the tile states exactly what it divided by. The monthly chart draws the budget as a line so an expensive month stands out at a glance.

TOIL never counts against the budget: banking time creates a liability in hours, not spend in money. If a large TOIL balance is building up, that is worth managing — but it is a different problem from an overspent budget, and merging the two into one number would hide both.

Approval

Each entry carries an approved tick and an "approved by" name. The headline tile counts entries still awaiting the tick, and the preview line flags an unapproved entry as you type. The tool does not route anything for approval — it records that approval happened. A workable routine is to log entries as they occur, then have the manager tick them in one sitting before the payroll cut-off, so nothing is paid or banked that was never agreed.

Reading the charts and tables

Paid overtime cost by month shows spend against the budget line — paid entries only. Overtime hours worked by employee counts hours actually worked, whether paid or banked: both are genuine extra work, in the same unit, so they can share a bar, and the label shows how much of each person's total was banked. Hours taken as TOIL are not work and are not in this chart. Entries by type shows how overtime is being settled, and cost by rate band shows where the premium money goes — if most of the cost sits at double time, rescheduling work out of premium hours saves more than trimming standard-rate overtime.

The per-employee summary gives each person's paid hours, paid cost, TOIL banked, taken and balance; the per-month summary gives entries, paid hours, cost, the share of the monthly budget used, and the net TOIL movement in hours. Cost columns and hour columns are never combined.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: the headline tiles, all four charts, both summary tables, the full register and your notes. Print to PDF to send it. The scope line under the title states the filter in force — clear the filters before issuing anything described as the full period, and remember the budget comparison always matches the months on view.

The report contains rates of pay. Treat the PDF as confidential and send it only to people entitled to see pay data.

Saving your work

Entries, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer — a different browser, a private window or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save: one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the filtered register, including the computed cost and TOIL columns, for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool calculates exactly what its formulas say and nothing more. It does not know your contracts, your collective agreements or your country's law — whether overtime attracts a mandatory premium, whether TOIL is permitted, at what rate it must be banked, how quickly it must be taken, or what happens to an unused balance when someone leaves. Those rules decide what the entries should say; the tool only does the arithmetic on what you enter.

It is not payroll software: it applies no tax, no on-costs and no rounding rules beyond ordinary currency display. Reconcile its totals against payroll before anything is paid, and treat the TOIL balance as a management figure, not a contractual statement of leave owed.