Yacht and Marine Crew Payroll: Getting Hours, Overtime and Day Rates Right

Salary, hourly or day rate: three ways crews are paid

Most marine businesses mix three models, sometimes for the same person at different times of year. Permanent yacht crew are typically on a monthly salary, and the time record mainly serves to track leave and extra days. Hourly pay with overtime suits shore-based technicians and seasonal crew whose work follows the season, the bookings and the weather: every hour counts and has to be recorded as it happens. Day rates fit day workers, deliveries and multi-day trips, where counting hours at sea makes little sense and an agreed amount per day is simpler for everyone. Whatever the mix, days paid at a day rate must come out of the hourly calculation. Leave them in and they show up as missing hours or phantom overtime, which is one of the most common spreadsheet errors in crew pay.

Overtime: agree the rule before you calculate

An overtime figure depends on choices that belong to the employer and the applicable law, not to the software: each person's expected hours, and how the excess is counted. For seafarers, working time and pay depend on the contract, the flag and any collective agreement. For shore-based staff they depend on the country. In the UK, for instance, employers do not have to pay workers for overtime at all, as long as average pay for all hours worked stays at or above the National Minimum Wage (gov.uk, Overtime: your rights), so any overtime rate comes from the contract. Write the rule down once, have your accountant check it, then apply it the same way every period. Captain Crews compares each person's clocked time with their expected schedule, day by day, over the whole pay period, leaving out public holidays, leave and cruise days, and shows the overtime multiplier set for that person. It does not handle tiered rates, night or Sunday premiums, or weekly thresholds such as a 40-hour week. If your rules need them, the day-by-day export gives your accountant what they need to apply them. These are the points to put in writing.

• Each person's expected hours, day by day.
• The period the excess is measured over: week, month or pay period.
• The overtime multiplier, and any tiers.
• What happens to extra hours: paid, taken as time off or carried forward.
• What happens to missing hours: taken from leave, carried forward or written off.

Worked example: a 26 August to 25 September pay period

A fictional example to show the mechanics: the employee, the company and the amounts don't exist, and no rate is presented as a legal one. A deckhand-engineer is scheduled for 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. The pay period runs from 26 August to 25 September 2026, which contains 23 weekdays. He goes on a trip at sea from Thursday 10 to Saturday 12 September and takes a day of annual leave on Monday 21 September. Leaving out the two weekday cruise days and the day of leave, his expected time is 20 days × 8 h, or 160 hours. His clocked time comes to 171 hours: 11 hours over schedule.

• Scheduled hours before adjustments: 23 days × 8 h = 184 h.
• Less 2 weekday cruise days (10 and 11 September) and 1 day of leave (21 September): 184 − 24 = 160 h expected. Saturday 12 has no scheduled hours, so it changes nothing.
• Clocked time: 171 h, including one evening with no clock-out (3 September), spotted in the history and corrected by the office before closing; the correction stays flagged as a manual entry.
• Excess: 171 − 160 = 11 h. At period close the company pays 8 h as overtime at his multiplier (1.5 in this example) and carries the other 3 h forward to the next period.
• Cruise: 3 days paid at the day rate set on his profile.
• Travel: 4 days in zone 2, paid at the amount set for him in that zone.
• Leave: 1 day taken from his annual allowance.
• Outside the tool: an end-of-season bonus agreed by management, sent to the accountant separately.

What your accountant receives, and what happens next

A closed period is locked, so the hours stop moving. For each person, the accountant gets an Excel workbook with four tabs (summary, day-by-day detail, leave, travel) and, from the Export screen, the monthly timesheet PDF and a CSV file of clock-ins. These contain hours, days and allowances, never a gross salary. From there, the accountant or payroll bureau applies base pay, any premiums your rules require and any bonuses, works out tax and contributions, issues the payslip and handles the filings your country requires. Captain Crews does none of those steps and is not a substitute for payroll software. The split has one clear benefit: every figure you hand over can be traced back day by day, which cuts the back-and-forth.

Several bases, time zones and currencies

Crews working out of several ports need a few simple rules before anyone clocks in. For travel, split your area into zones and set an amount per zone for each person, or a per-kilometre rate, so allowances come straight from the day's record rather than from expense claims pieced together later. For time, pick a reference time zone: the app uses one per company, with daylight saving handled, and a crew member temporarily in another zone is still counted in the company's time. For money, the company currency is the euro or the US dollar. Hours and days don't depend on any currency, and your accountant pays in whatever currency the contract states.

• Travel zones: up to six per company, plus zones specific to one owner; this is part of the Company plan.
• An owner who runs the crew of their own boat can set schedules, zones and leave, and close the pay period themselves.

Period-end checklist

Payroll errors rarely come from the arithmetic. They come from a missed clock-out, leave that was never entered or a trip logged late. Ten minutes per person before closing saves most of the back-and-forth with the accountant.

• Look for unusually long days (16 hours or more): they are nearly always forgotten clock-outs. Fix them; the correction stays flagged as a manual entry.
• Check that every approved day of leave and sick day appears in the period.
• Check trip dates: a forgotten cruise day turns into a missing day.
• Check the travel zone on days spent away from base.
• Decide, person by person, what happens to extra or missing hours: paid, carried forward or taken from leave.
• Close, export, and send everything to the accountant with a list of what sits outside the tool: one-off bonuses, advances, expense refunds.

What Captain Crews does, and what it doesn't

Captain Crews, marine management software, covers the upstream side of payroll: clock-in on a phone with the location recorded at each clock-in, overtime worked out over the pay period, cruise days at a day rate, travel allowances, leave, period close and exports for your accountant. It does not produce payslips, calculate tax or contributions, file anything, manage bonuses or keep seafarers' hours-of-rest records. Payroll itself stays with your accountant.