Overtime not being paid on time.

[Spratt]

Let's start from the start.

I love my job. It's my childhood dream job and I've been doing it 6 months now. I work 160 hours every 4 weeks and anything over that is overtime at 1.5. I don't mind doing overtime at all. I do between say 12 and 30 hours a month. I get paid my salary every month (salary divided by 12) and then we have monthly cut offs for our overtime claims. Normally the 15th?(need to check this) of the month. Because our rosters our 4 weekly the date they end changes and 1 month of the year we get 2 lots of overtime (52 weeks divided by 12 is 13 rosters)

Hopefully it's all making sense so far!

My contract says I get paid on the 28th of every month unless it falls on a weekend or holiday in which case we will get paid the working day before.(Friday normally). So a few months ago somehow they forgot my overtime. It was submitted well before but my line manager was away for two weeks so it never got authorised on time. It ended up being rolled over to the next month. I wasn't particularly happy about this but I got my money in the end and they said the situation had found a hole in the system that would be fixed. So in theory that shouldn't every happen again.

December came and I submitted my time sheet on the 3rd for the supervisor to check overtimes(it's a complicated system.....) He then sends me confirmation I can claim the hours I've put down on the 8th. I instantly put my overtime through on my work phone (itrent system). This is then authorised on the 16th.

Now for Christmas they decided to pay us early (20th) and moved the cut off forward to the 7th!! So when I got paid on the 20th I again had no overtime!! This I will call my November overtime as that's when I actually did the overtime.

I went to my manager who was very apologetic. Looked into and said the cut off was the 7th due to the early pay. But my contract says I get paid on the 28th?(or working day before) so can they just move it like that?

And now we reach the end of January and they produce our payslips a few days early...... Still no November overtime!!! But I do have the December overtime.

So they've failed again, and my November overtime claim is now not on the system. I've spoken to HR and they've said they don't know why it's done it, but can I resubmit it and I'll get it in February!!! I've said that's not good enough, I'm properly grumpy about not being paid and I would like my money on the 28th when we get paid. They went away but I still haven't heard anything. I shouldn't have to wait until Feb 28 for overtime I worked in November!?

From my research this goes down as unauthorised deductions? Or breach of contract? So in my first 6 months of employment with them they have breached my contract 3 times already?


where do I stand? What can I do? Obviously I love my job but HR seem to be making a right mess of it and I want them to know this is not on. But I definitely don't want to leave!!!! I just want to be paid for the work I do.

Sorry for the long post!!!

Spratt

[ULA]

So it would appear the issue is in regard to your overtime being paid when you believe it to be due, not your basic salary.

Admin errors do happen in reference to the issue you had a few months before and seems to be due to the fact they had no system in place for another manager to authorise your overtime if your manager is on holiday. However that was resolved and you did get your overtime paid.

The mechanics of most payroll systems in that yes, contractually you may get paid on a set day in the month however payroll systems often carry out the admin of processing that payroll a lot earlied in the month, in your case around the middle of the month. Some organisations pay Dec payroll early (which is very thoughtful of them) the cut-off point for running the payroll will always be earlier in the month than normal. This means that any submission of overtime will either need to be done earlier in the month or if it misses the submission date it will be held over to be paid in the next payroll. Ideally they should warn staff that any overtime needs to be submitted earlier in the month.

Admittedly you should not have to wait until Feb for your Nov overtime, it should have been Jan at the very latest. I would suggest that you go back to HR in writing and ask them to confirm that everything is in order for you to receive your Nov overtime in the Feb payroll run.