Overtime premiums that look fine until you recalculate one week
A single week of recalculated overtime often reveals rest-day and holiday premium gaps that monthly totals conceal.
Monthly overtime totals can look orderly while daily premiums are wrong. The gap appears when you rebuild one busy week from attendance punches and compare it to what payroll paid.
Rest-day work and national holiday hours carry different premium expectations than weekday overtime. If your time system collapses all extra hours into one bucket, the payroll team may apply a single rate by habit.
Pick a high-volume week—product launches, inventory counts, or festival retail peaks—and recalculate by day. Document the attendance source, the rate applied, and the amount paid. Discrepancies under a few hundred dollars per person still matter when they repeat across a department.
When findings appear, ask whether the error is configuration, supervisor approval, or a one-off manual override. Each cause needs a different remediation path.
Share the recalculation worksheet with HR before expanding the sample. Early alignment prevents arguments about methodology later in the engagement.