Can't I just calculate hours with an Excel formula? What does the calculator do differently?
You can, and Excel is excellent once you know its traps. A plain end-minus-start formula goes negative for a 22:00 to 06:00 shift unless you wrap it in MOD, time cells must be multiplied by 24 before the rate, and adding up rounded decimal hours drifts. The calculator handles those for you; Excel is still the better place for reports of your own.
Trap one: the overnight shift
Excel stores times as fractions of a day. 22:00 is about 0.917 and 06:00 is 0.25. So =B2-A2 for a 22:00 to 06:00 shift gives a negative number, which Excel shows as ##### in a time cell. The known fix is =MOD(B2-A2,1) and then subtract the break, and it only takes one row where somebody forgot it to spoil the total.
In the calculator you type 22:00, 06:00 and a 60 minute break, and the row shows 7:00 with a '+1 day' badge. The rule is fixed: an end earlier than the start means the next day, with no formula to remember.
Trap two: 7:30 is not 7.30
A cell showing 7:30 actually holds 0.3125, a fraction of a day. Multiply it by the hourly rate and you get a tiny amount. You have to multiply by 24 first to get 7.5 hours, then by the rate. People who dodge that by typing hours as plain decimals fall into the opposite trap: they type 7.30 meaning seven and a half hours, and the employee loses 12 minutes.
Trap three: totals over 24 hours
Sum a week of times in a cell formatted h:mm and Excel shows only what is left after each full 24 hours. A week of 39:10 can display as 15:10 unless you change the format to [h]:mm. The calculator never wraps hours, so the total reads 39:10 as it should.
Trap four: adding rounded decimals
Take an employee working five days from 08:10 to 16:00 at 30 SAR an hour. Each day is 7:50, or 7.83 in decimal after rounding. Multiply 7.83 x 5 x 30 and you get 1,174.50 SAR. The calculator adds whole minutes, 39:10, multiplies by the rate and rounds once, giving 1,175.00 SAR. That is 50 halalas a week for one person, and it grows with every employee and every week.
When Excel is the better choice
- When you want several employees in one file; the calculator works on one sheet at a time.
- When you have weekly overtime or a night allowance; the calculator only applies a daily threshold to each row.
- When you want charts or month-on-month reports.
Using both works well: calculate in the Timesheet calculator so the figures are right, then download the CSV and open it in Excel to build whatever you need. The file carries each day's hours in h:mm and in decimal, so there is no time formula to rewrite.
Common questions
Is the calculator more accurate than Excel?
Excel is accurate when the formulas are right. The calculator's advantage is that it applies the same rules to every row without you writing any.
Can I import an Excel file into the calculator?
No, there is no import. The available direction is from the calculator to Excel, through the CSV.
Why does the decimal column not add up to the total hours?
Each decimal is shown rounded to two places, while the total is worked out from whole minutes.