Overtime Rules: Daily, Weekly, and the Union Agreement Trap
Overtime looks simple until the agreement says weekly and your config says daily. Model the actual rule or pay the wrong amount forever.
Overtime is where OTL meets the real world of union agreements and labour law, and the two rarely match the default config. The trap is configuring daily overtime because it's easy, when the agreement is weekly. You'll pay wrong every single week until someone notices.
Read the agreement before you touch the system
Daily threshold, weekly threshold, double-time after a point, premium on the seventh consecutive day, these are contractual. Get the actual rules in front of you and configure to them exactly. Guessing costs money and grievances.
Layer the rules in the right order
When daily and weekly overtime both apply, the order of evaluation matters, you don't want to pay overtime twice on the same hour. OTL handles layered rules, but you have to sequence them so they stack correctly rather than double-count.
Test the boundary weeks
The weeks that break overtime are the messy ones: a bank holiday, a mid-week absence, a shift crossing the week boundary. Test those deliberately, not a clean Monday-to-Friday.
Real scenario: a client configured daily overtime; their agreement was weekly-only. Workers under 40 hours who had one long day were getting overtime they weren't owed, and the company was quietly overpaying thousands a month. We rebuilt to weekly thresholds matching the agreement. Overpayment stopped, and the reconfiguration paid for itself in a fortnight.