What is Overtime Pay?
Overtime pay kicks in the moment a non-exempt employee crosses 40 hours in one workweek. From that point on, every extra hour gets paid at 1.5 times their normal rate, what most people call "time and a half." There's no getting around it and no negotiating it. If the hours are there, the pay is owed.
You see this play out constantly in a restaurant. Someone covers a coworker's shift at the last minute. The kitchen's slammed on a Saturday and the line cooks stay two hours late. None of that feels like a big deal in the moment, but those hours pile up fast, and before you know it, someone's well past 40 for the week without anyone really tracking it.
One thing owners get wrong a lot putting someone on salary doesn't automatically get you out of paying overtime. Unless that person genuinely qualifies as exempt, salary or not, they're still owed overtime once they go over 40 hours.
Small math errors here don't stay small. Miscalculate overtime for one person on one shift, and it's a minor issue. Do it across a whole team for a few months, and it turns into real money owed, plus a headache if it ever gets flagged. This is exactly why accurate time tracking matters so much, and why plenty of businesses now use payroll software to calculate overtime automatically as hours get logged, rather than doing it by hand at the end of the pay period.