Maybe its me, but there is no way to distinguish between contracted hours and
overtime.

I don't need any extra departmental information apart from name.

Anyway,

I did as you said with a slight change:

"Employee"

EmployeeID (PK)
Employee
Status
Rate

"Payroll"

Payroll (PK)
Employee ID (FK)
Subdepartment (FK)
WeekID
Amount

"Subdepartment"

DepartmentID
SubdepartmentID (PK)

I created a query from this but it gives one sub-form, not two, so maybe
thats my fault.

Thanks for the help and I think I can see where I am going wrong but telling
me what fields you think I need may not be the same as what I think are
necessary. I really want to normalise the fields I listed originally because
they are the ones I need.

(A) I would rather use PayrollID as employee ID since that is unique

(B) I would like to distinguish between contracted hours and overtime.

(C) I need to be sure that the hours entered relate to the correct department.

"mnature" wrote:

In my current design I do have a main form with two subforms and it is what
I
want.

You may want to have several main forms, with related subforms. The reason
is, that you will want to display information in several ways. You can sort
by departments, subdepartments, full-time, part-time. Totals can be per
week. How much was paid in overtime? How many employees are in each
department/subdepartment, and how many are full-time or part-time? What part
of payroll goes to full-time, and what part goes to part-time? Which
department/subdepartment pays out the most overtime?

The point of a database is to have a pile of data, out of which you can mine
a lot of information. Once you have accumulated enough data, then you can
get some very valuable information from it. For instance, if you look at
where most of your overtime is being paid through a year, then you can
discuss whether some new employees need to be hired.