Overtime Tracker

What is an overtime tracker?

An overtime tracker compares each team member's logged hours against their contracted weekly hours — flagging who is running over before it becomes a payroll issue, a burnout risk, or a billing discrepancy. It answers the question managers need to know on Thursday, not the question HR asks on the last day of the month.

Melororium's Overtime Tracker sets a weekly hours baseline per team member based on their contract. As hours log to tasks throughout the week, the report shows: hours used, hours remaining in contract, and hours over contract. At 90% of weekly contract hours, a notification fires. By Friday, the manager knows who needs relief — not on the payroll run.

Why overtime surprises are expensive

Overtime discovered at month end is expensive in three ways. First, payroll: compensating overtime you weren't expecting is a cash flow problem. Second, project margins: a team member working 55 hours on a 40-hour-week contract is costing 37.5% more than budgeted on their cost allocation. Third, retention: consistent unaddressed overtime is one of the top predictors of employee resignation in knowledge work.

The irony is that most overtime is visible in advance. A task assigned on Monday with a Friday deadline that's twice the normal size will produce overtime if no one adjusts. The problem isn't the work — it's that there's no system that surfaces the implication before the team member works the extra hours.

How managers catch overtime before it happens

Contract hours as the baseline

Each team member has a weekly hours baseline in their Melororium profile: 40 hours, 32 hours, 20 hours for part-time, whatever their contract specifies. This baseline is the reference point for everything in the overtime tracker — not the team average, not "full-time equivalent," but the individual contract.

90% alert before the limit is reached

At 90% of weekly contract hours, the system sends a notification to the team member and the manager. This leaves 10% of the week's budget as a buffer: enough hours to finish in-progress work, not enough to take on new tasks without a conversation about priorities or deadlines.

Overtime by project — find the source

When a team member goes over their weekly hours, the overtime report breaks down which projects drove the overrun. If the same client project consistently generates overtime across multiple team members, that's a signal: the project is either under-staffed, under-scoped, or under-priced. The data makes the case for raising the retainer or renegotiating the scope.

Export for payroll processing

At month end, export the overtime log as Excel or PDF: team member, week, hours contracted, hours logged, hours over contract. Pass to payroll or finance for compensation processing. The data is clean, timestamped, and broken down by week — not a summary estimate.

Overtime tracking vs. manual spreadsheets

Most teams track overtime in a spreadsheet where managers manually compare logged hours to contracted hours at month end. This process typically takes 2–3 hours for a 10-person team, is error-prone because the data comes from multiple sources, and is always a month late.

Melororium automates this entirely. The comparison runs continuously as hours log to tasks. The overtime report is always current. Agency plan for 10 users is $59/mo — time tracking, overtime detection, and work reports all included.