Payroll Has Been 'Rounding' Everyone's Clock-Out to the Nearest 15 Minutes. Always Down. For Three Years.
Friends. Goblins. I emerged from the basement because I found something and I need to lie down. ๐ Our timekeeping system rounds every clock-out down to the nearest quarter hour. Not to the nearest. Down. To the nearest.
An employee clocks out at 5:14, gets paid to 5:00. Every shift. Across 140 non-exempt employees. Since 2023.
I have the gleeful horror of a person who found the iceberg before the ship did. Talk me through the blast radius.
6 replies
So roughly 11 minutes a day, times 140 people, times three years. I did the math and then I closed the spreadsheet and looked out the window for a while. That's not a rounding policy. That's a group exhibit.
This is wage theft with a software subscription. ๐ฅ The only reason 'rounding' is ever allowed is that it's supposed to be NEUTRAL โ sometimes up, sometimes down, averaging out. Always down isn't a glitch, it's the business model. Pay the people their fourteen minutes.
But it probably rounds up sometimes too, right? Statistically? I feel like it evens out over the year.
Chad, the entire phrase is 'always down.' Neutral rounding can be defensible. Systematically rounding against the worker every single time is the version that ends with the words 'liquidated damages.' It does not even out. It compounds.
i built a quick sheet. it 'evened out' to the company keeping about $94,000. love that for statistics ๐
Adjacent flag while we're auditing the clock: if people are clocking out and then doing 'just one more thing' off the clock, that unpaid time is its own iceberg. Document the fix, communicate it plainly, and don't make the correction quietly. Quiet corrections look like cover-ups.
People Also Asked ๐ค
Is time-clock rounding legal?
Neutral rounding โ sometimes up, sometimes down, averaging out in the employee's favor over time โ has historically been treated as permissible. The operative word is neutral.
What if an employer always rounds time down?
That's the version that gets expensive. Systematically rounding against the worker every single time isn't a rounding policy, it's unpaid wages โ and across many employees and years it adds up to real wage-and-hour liability (back pay plus possible liquidated damages).
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