What Is FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act)?
You know that rule about overtime pay being time and a half? That comes from the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), a federal law that's been on the books since 1938. It's the whole reason minimum wage exists, why overtime is a thing, why you're supposed to track hours a certain way, and why there's a minimum age before someone can go on your schedule.
The part that really matters day to day: once an hourly employee crosses 40 hours in a week, you owe them 1.5x their normal rate for anything past that. Easy enough in theory. Then Friday night hits, someone calls out, the rest of the team picks up the slack and stays late to cover it, and suddenly those extra hours have quietly stacked up without anyone really noticing. Miss it, even by accident, and you're on the hook for back pay. Worst case, the Department of Labor gets involved.
The FLSA is also behind that exempt vs. non-exempt distinction you've probably run into. Whichever one applies to an employee decides how they're paid and whether overtime even comes into play for them.
Doing all this by hand works fine when you've got two or three people on payroll. Once your team grows past that, it stops being realistic, which is basically why payroll software exists. It just does the math in the background so you're not stuck memorizing labor law on top of running a restaurant.