How to track hours for multiple jobs

Working more than one job — two clients, three houses you clean, a day job plus weekend shifts — multiplies the bookkeeping. Each job has its own rate, its own pay schedule, often its own overtime rules, and each one expects its own timesheet at the end of the period. The failure mode is always the same: hours from one job blur into another, and you undercharge someone or can’t explain a total. Here is what a clean setup looks like.

Keep each job’s record separate from day one

A single running list of hours is not enough, because pay is computed per job: different rates, different overtime thresholds, different pay periods. Whatever tool you use, you want each job to be its own container — its own rate history, its own week, its own export — so that “how much does the Smith residence owe me this period” is a number you can read, not a filtering exercise.

The overtime question: per job, or pooled?

Here is the part nobody warns you about. If you work 30 hours for one client and 20 for another in the same week, did you work overtime? It depends on who is paying:

• Separate employers → usually per job. Two unrelated clients don’t owe you a combined-hours premium; each relationship is judged on its own hours.
• Same employer, multiple sites or roles → usually pooled. If one employer has you at two locations, the law in many places looks at your total hours for that employer when deciding overtime.

Getting this wrong in a tracker either invents overtime nobody owes you, or silently loses overtime you are owed.

How Valio handles it

• Unlimited jobs, each with its own rules. Every job gets its own pay rate, overtime tiers, premium rules, and pay period — weekly, biweekly, twice monthly, four-weekly, or monthly, matched to how that job actually pays you.
• Overtime counted per job, or pooled across every job you work — you choose, so both of the situations above are represented correctly.
• A timer on each job at once. Clock in on one job, and if the afternoon takes you somewhere else, start that job’s timer too — overlapping work is recorded against the right job.
• One timesheet per job. Export a PDF or CSV scoped to a job and its pay period, with your name and contact details on it, ready to send to that client and no other client’s hours anywhere near it.
• A raise never rewrites the past. Rates carry their history, so updating one job’s rate today doesn’t change what last month’s shifts were worth.

The jobs list shows this week’s hours on every job at a glance, and the pay screen totals what you’ve earned — and what is still unpaid — across all of them, in your local currency.

Whether hours must be combined for overtime depends on your employment situation and local rules — this guide is general information, not legal advice.