Chippy Timesheet Wages Excel - Free Template

1. Open the Timesheet sheet and check the business details and pay period shown in the heading. Replace the example Aotearoa Chippy Co. information with your own details.
2. Enter one row for each employee and work date. Complete the Employee, Role, Date and Job Site columns so the hours can be traced to a person and site.
3. Record Start Time, Finish Time and Break (hrs). Use decimal hours for breaks, such as 0.5 for 30 minutes.
4. Enter the employee's Hourly Rate ($). Check the rate against the employment agreement before relying on the calculated wages.
5. Review Total Hours, Ordinary Hrs and Overtime Hrs (1.5x). Check any unusually long day before moving to payroll.
6. Read the Ordinary Pay, Overtime Pay, Gross Pay, PAYE Tax Est., KiwiSaver 3% and Net Pay columns. Treat PAYE and net pay as estimates until checked against your payroll process.
7. Open Wages Dashboard to review the fortnight's totals, then read Instructions before saving a copy for your payroll and job-costing records.

The useful point of a chippy timesheet is that it joins attendance to the job site. A builder or foreman can enter a Monday spent on a renovation in Auckland CBD separately from a Tuesday on a new deck, rather than handing the office one total of 16 hours with no costing trail.

The office manager's weekly check

Imagine a Christchurch building firm with four staff. Hemi works 8 hours on Monday with a 30-minute break, so the row records 7.5 hours worked; Manaia may have 9.5 hours after her break, with the excess moving into the Overtime Hrs (1.5x) column. The hourly rate then drives ordinary and overtime pay.

The office manager can enter the rows as timesheets arrive, instead of reconstructing them on payday. Checking the job-site column against the project diary also exposes a missing day or an employee recorded on the wrong build before wages are processed.

When the dashboard earns its keep

At the end of the fortnight, the Wages Dashboard gives the owner a quicker view of labour totals than scanning every daily row. If 4 employees average 80 hours each at $32.50 per hour, ordinary wages alone are $10,400 before overtime, employer costs and leave accruals.

This is also useful at month-end when a small builder compares labour charged to a project with the invoice value. The workbook is a practical timesheet and wage estimate, not a replacement for a payroll system or a final job-costing ledger.

The workbook displays estimated PAYE, a 3% KiwiSaver amount and net pay, but those figures must be checked against current payroll rules and each employee's tax code. Payday filing requires employers to send employment information to Inland Revenue after each payday; the IR348 employer monthly schedule is no longer the whole process for modern payday filing.

KiwiSaver and wage calculations

The minimum compulsory employee and employer KiwiSaver contribution is 3% of gross salary or wages. On $1,200 gross pay, 3% is $36, but the employee deduction, employer contribution and ESCT treatment are separate payroll items. Do not use the Net Pay column as the amount to pay until the correct tax code, student loan status and contribution settings have been applied.

Employment agreements and the Holidays Act 2003 still govern ordinary hours, overtime arrangements, annual holidays and public holidays. The statutory annual holidays entitlement is 4 weeks after 12 months, while sick leave is generally 10 days after the relevant eligibility period. The spreadsheet does not replace leave calculations.

Minimum wage and records

Check the applicable New Zealand minimum wage before entering an hourly rate, particularly for apprentices and younger workers. Keep wage and time records for at least 7 years for Inland Revenue purposes, and retain enough detail to support the hours, rate and deductions reported.

A 31 March balance date is standard for many businesses, but payroll information also feeds ACC levy calculations and annual accounts. Use the workbook as an audit trail, then reconcile its fortnightly totals to your payroll filing and bank payment.

The expensive mistakes I see are usually small entry errors repeated across a crew. A finish time of 5:00 entered as 17:00, a break left blank, or 0.5 typed as 5 can turn a normal day into a large overtime or gross-pay error.

Hours that do not match the site

Suppose a worker is entered for 10 hours on a job but the site diary shows 8.5 hours after breaks. At $35 an hour, that is $52.50 of excess ordinary pay for one day; across 10 similar rows it becomes $525 before the knock-on effect on deductions and job margins.

Another common failure is using one row for a week and putting a note such as two days at Site A and three at Site B. That saves minutes at entry time but makes project costing and a later payroll query much harder. Separate daily rows are the better choice.

Estimated deductions mistaken for final payroll

The Timesheet includes PAYE Tax Est. and KiwiSaver 3%, which are helpful warning figures but not a full payroll calculation. A tax code change, student loan deduction, child support order, ESCT or a different KiwiSaver rate can make the actual net pay differ from the displayed estimate.

Paying the dashboard total without reconciling employee rows can also hide a duplicated shift. If 20 staff rows contain one duplicate 8-hour shift at $30, the gross wage overstatement is $240, and finding it after payday means a correction rather than a simple edit.

Overtime and breaks need a policy

Do not assume every hour over 8 is automatically overtime. Use the employment agreement and your agreed payroll rule. The sheet labels overtime at 1.5x, so confirm that this is the rate you have agreed before approving the fortnight.

That same approval step also belongs beside a wage tracking sheet for recording each row before the fortnight is signed off.

A spreadsheet only helps if the crew completes it while the work is fresh. Set a fixed cut-off, such as 10:00 am on the final Friday of the fortnight, and make the foreman responsible for checking every employee row before the office starts payroll.

Use a short review checklist

• Compare each Date and Job Site with the site diary or project-management record.
• Check Start Time, Finish Time and Break (hrs) for impossible values or unusually long shifts.
• Filter for overtime and confirm it was approved under the employment agreement.
• Compare the Wages Dashboard totals with the payroll batch before making the bank payment.

Save a dated copy after each pay run, such as Chippy wages 07-07-2026 to 20-07-2026. Keep the original template untouched so you can copy a clean workbook for the next period. If several people edit it, store one controlled copy rather than emailing different versions around the office.

Make entry consistent

Use decimal breaks consistently: 0.25 means 15 minutes and 0.5 means 30 minutes. Give supervisors a two-minute explanation of the columns, especially the difference between Total Hours and Overtime Hrs (1.5x).

Move to Xero, MYOB or dedicated payroll software when you need leave balances, payday filing, employee self-service, multiple pay rates or reliable audit permissions. For a crew of 4 with one fortnightly pay run, this workbook can be a sensible starting point; for 20 employees, manual checking becomes the bigger cost.

Once payroll grows beyond manual checking, the next step is often a deduction calculation sheet for working out net pay more reliably.