How to calculate cast hours
Where the day starts, what comes out for meals, why travel is kept separate, and how a blank field changes the answer.
Checked against sources
Totalling a performer’s day is four questions in a trench coat: when did it start, when did it end, what comes out of the middle, and how does the remainder split into pay bands. Each one has a wrinkle.
Where the day starts
Usually at call. But if the performer was in makeup or wardrobe before call, the day started then — so the tool takes the earlier of the two, and tells you which one it used.
On-set time is recorded but changes nothing. It belongs on the breakdown because people ask for it, not because it moves the total.
What comes out
Meal breaks. You can enter more than one, and each is deducted in full from the elapsed time.
A long day with one meal
Call 7:00 AM → wrap 9:30 PM
Elapsed 14 hr 30 min
Meal 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM −1 hr
Worked 13 hr 30 min
Straight 8 hr · time-and-a-half 4 hr · double 1 hr 30 min
Leaving the meal blank does not quietly deduct an hour. The tool assumes nothing — it totals what you gave it and states in the result that no meal was entered. A blank field is a fact about your input, not a gap for the tool to fill.
If a break overlaps another, or falls outside the working day, the tool says so. Both are usually a typo in a date, and both would otherwise silently shorten the day.
Why travel is kept separate
Travel is entered on its own and reported on its own. It never joins worked time and it never enters the overtime bands.
That is deliberate, because travel is treated differently by different agreements, and in ways that are not small. One BC agreement caps out-of-zone travel time at half an hour a day. Another pays it as working time with no cap at all. Folding travel into the worked total would produce a number that is wrong under one of them, and you would have no way to see it happen.
The overtime bands
Straight time up to a threshold, then time-and-a-half for a second band, then double time for everything after. You set both thresholds; the defaults are eight and four, which are common but are not a rule and are not sourced from any agreement.
The bands always add back up to the worked total. That is asserted in the tests rather than assumed, because a banding bug that loses fifteen minutes is exactly the kind that nobody notices.
Days that cross the clock change
Time is counted as real elapsed time, so a day spanning a daylight saving change is eleven or thirteen hours rather than twelve — and the result says which direction and why. Same reasoning as turnaround: the clock is a label, the hours worked are the thing.
Over fourteen hours
The tool raises a note. At least one BC agreement provides that a performer who has worked more than fourteen hours and says they are too tired to drive home safely can ask for courtesy housing, or transport home and back at the employer’s expense.
That is surfaced as a prompt to check the applicable agreement, not as a statement that you are entitled to it. It is the kind of provision people do not know to ask about, which is the only reason the tool mentions it at all.
What this tool does not do
It applies no agreement rule and rounds nothing. The totals are raw. Whether time is rounded, in which direction, and to what increment is set by the agreement and by payroll — and at least one BC agreement specifies tenths of an hour, always rounded up. Until presets are sourced and reviewed, this tool will not guess which regime you are under.
It also does not calculate money. It gives you hours in each band; what those hours are worth is a rate question, and rates belong to your deal.