Time tracking for hotels that never close

Four departments, four kinds of hours

A 90-room property might employ 12 housekeepers on a 7:30 to 4:00 pattern, 6 front desk agents rotating through three shifts, 8 kitchen staff on splits around breakfast and dinner, and 2 maintenance technicians on call. Pooling all of them into one schedule hides the problems that matter. Housekeeping overtime comes from room counts. Front desk overtime comes from call-outs. Kitchen overtime comes from banquets. Maintenance overtime comes from emergencies.

Set up each department as its own group so managers see only their own people, and so a weekly report can say “housekeeping used 41 overtime hours” instead of “the hotel used 60”.

Housekeeping: rooms per hour is a pay question

Many properties assign each housekeeper a room count, such as 14 rooms in an 8 hour shift. That works out to roughly 34 minutes a room. When occupancy is full of checkouts, the same count takes longer, and the housekeeper either stays late or skips breaks. Hours worked still have to be paid whether or not the quota was met, so the clock should show what actually happened.

Seeing 1.6 hours of overtime tied to nine checkouts tells you to cut the assignment on heavy checkout days instead of simply asking people to work faster.

The night audit and midnight

The night auditor often clocks in at 11 p.m. and out at 7 a.m. Decide in writing which workweek the shift belongs to (most employers use the day it started) and keep it consistent. A workweek is a fixed period of seven consecutive 24 hour periods, and it does not have to match the calendar week. Pick a start time that falls in your quietest hour so shifts are rarely split across two workweeks.

Banquets and seasonal peaks

Weddings and conferences create short bursts: a banquet server may work six hours on Saturday after a full week elsewhere. A live running total shows who is near forty hours before you offer the extra shift. Some cities have ordinances for hotel workers that touch workload or scheduling, so check local rules for your location.

What to record

• Clock in and out by department and location.
• Meal breaks, with the start and end time.
• Early arrivals that were not scheduled.
• Who approved each overtime hour.
• Shift swaps, with both employees’ names.

Staffing housekeeping from the arrivals report

Housekeeping hours should come from tomorrow’s departures and stayovers, not from a fixed roster. A checkout room needs a full strip, bathroom and linen change. A stayover is usually lighter, and some guests decline service altogether. Build a simple rule with your own timings, then check it against clocked hours every week.

The table below uses made-up timings, 30 minutes for a checkout and 18 for a stayover, for a fictional 120-room property. Your numbers will differ by room size and brand standard, which is why you measure them yourself.

Sunday has fewer guests than Saturday but nearly the same housekeeping load, because so many rooms check out. Staffing by occupancy alone would leave Sunday short and Wednesday overstaffed. Add time for public areas, linen runs and the inspector, then convert hours to attendants using your shift length.

Tips, service charges and the hotel wage rules

Hotels mix tipped and non-tipped jobs under one roof, and the rules differ for each. Under the federal FLSA, employers may pay tipped employees, such as servers, bell staff and some bartenders, a cash wage as low as $2.13 an hour if tips bring them to at least the full minimum wage. Several states, including California, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Nevada, Montana and Alaska, do not allow a tip credit at all.

A mandatory service charge on a banquet or room service bill is not a tip under federal law. It belongs to the hotel, and if part of it is passed to staff, it counts as wages and goes into the regular rate for overtime. Some states go further. New York’s hospitality wage order, for example, treats a charge that a customer would reasonably think is a gratuity as belonging to the staff unless the hotel clearly tells guests otherwise.

Since 2018, federal law has barred employers, managers and supervisors from keeping any part of employees’ tips, whether or not the hotel takes a tip credit. See tip pooling rules before you set up a pool for the front desk and bell stand.

Who works when, by role

Mistakes hotels make with hours

• Staffing housekeeping from occupancy alone instead of checkouts and stayovers.
• Letting attendants clock out and then finish their last room, which is unpaid work.
• Counting a banquet employee’s hours separately in each department, which hides weekly overtime.
• Treating mandatory service charges as tips on the payroll report.
• Rounding night audit punches in one direction only.

Questions people ask

Keep reading