Time Conversion: How to Convert Hours & Minutes to Decimal Time

Calculating working hours can be a complicated matter due to the challenge of converting hours and minutes to decimal hours. And yet, employees and HR teams have to manage this in order to ensure accurate compensation during payroll.

In this post, we’ll be demonstrating how you can make timekeeping easy by using either a time conversion chart or a time calculator to turn the number of hours worked into decimal numbers for timesheets.

What is Time Card Conversion?

Time card conversion is the process of turning the total hours employees have worked into decimal values that can be used to calculate their total pay.

This process is important because accurate values ensure that employees are compensated for their time and avoids potential fraud (unintentional or otherwise). In an indirect way, compensating employees accurately and in a timely manner helps ensure their productivity is high, which contributes directly to business profitability.

Time Card Conversion in Practice

Let’s say you used a time tracking software such as Buddy Punch to determine that an employee worked for 7 hours and 30 minutes. Most tools will output employee time into a time format that looks something like HH:MM:SS (with HH being hours, MM being minutes, and SS being seconds.) In the case of this employee, it’d be 07:30:00.

In order to convert this into decimal format, step 1 is to take the number of hours worked as a whole number (7 hours worked = 7.0). Then, you would take the minutes worked (30 minutes) and divide that by 60 to get the decimal minutes. (30/60 = 0.5). Then, add them together – and don’t forget to move the decimal places while calculating the time duration!

7.0 + 0.5 = 7.5 is the decimal time value for this employee’s shift. From here you can determine the total amount of pay for that employee by multiplying the decimal time by their hourly wage.

You can also make use of a conversion chart to help you find the shorthand values for translating minutes to decimals.

Though some employers are totally fine calculating total time worked manually, there are many shortcuts available to save time while still producing accurate results. In some cases, these results are even more accurate than manual methods.

Convert Minutes to Decimal Time with an Online Calculator

One method that you can use to subtract from the difficulty of time card conversion is to make use of an online calculator as a time converter. For example, Buddy Punch has a free online time card calculator that allows anyone to input clock in and clock out times (as well as break times) to get their total hours worked and total gross pay expected.

The advantage of using an hours calculator is that you no longer have to manually convert the hours worked into your decimal units of time since the calculator does that automatically. Our calculator operates in much the same way a Microsoft Excel sheet with built-in formulas would.

However, it does still take some time to input all the clock in and out values – time that could be saved by taking an additional step.

Use a Time Clock to Automatically Convert Hours & Minutes to Decimal Time for Payroll

If your goal is ensuring that all work hours are properly accounted for and compensated, you can’t go wrong with using a time clock like Buddy Punch. In addition to eliminating the chance of human error with automatic calculations, Buddy Punch has timekeeping and employee scheduling features to boost productivity for your team. You can even add on Buddy Punch’s built-in payroll processing to make use of your employee data in one spot.

You don’t have to worry about conversions either. Buddy Punch automatically makes use of the decimal format throughout our software. If you’re wondering how to convert decimal time to hours and minutes with our software, subscribers can use the Employee Detail Report and Payroll Export to see hours worked in both the decimal format as well as standard hour and number of minutes format.

Converting Between Hours and Decimals is Part of Doing Business

Since there’s no way to get around having to convert time between hours and minutes to decimal form (or vice versa), business owners would be better served by embracing any methods that help them save time on this process when they calculate payroll.

Doing these conversions for every employee on a weekly or biweekly basis adds up to time that could be better spent optimizing your business. That’s why we encourage business owners to either make use of time to decimal calculators or, better yet, to invest in a time tracking software like Buddy Punch to handle all calculations for them.

Try Buddy Punch for Free

If you feel that Buddy Punch could be the right attendance & time system to handle your hour and decimal conversions, sign up for a free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video.