Configuring Breaks
This guide will help you automate unpaid breaks and manage paid breaks in TimeKeeper.
Automatic Unpaid Breaks
The purpose of this feature is to allow employees to clock in at the start of their work, clock out at the end of their work and TimeKeeper takes care of automatically deducting the relevant break for that employee.
There are two types of unpaid break in TimeKeeper:
Day Break - set to apply at fixed time each day.
Flexi Break - break deducts after the specified number of hours have passed.
Only tick to SKIP a day. When setting unpaid breaks, you only need tick days that don't have a break.
Flexi Breaks are not cumulative. If you have a flexi break of 15 minutes after 4 hours, and 30 after 6 hours, an employee working 7 hours would receive 30 minute break deduction, not 45.
Unpaid Breaks for Shift Workers
If your employee has a regularly changing schedule, you'll likely want to set them as a Shift Worker and manage their schedule via the Rota Planner (you can learn more about Rota Planner here)
You can add a break into a shift, or manage within the employees profile as shown in the clip above.
If a break is set both within a shift and an employee profile - both will be applied.
Irregular Breaks
If automated break features like Day Breaks or Flexi-Breaks aren't suitable, you may require employees to clock in and out for breaks. If an employee clocks out, they will not be paid for that time. Upon returning and clocking in, TimeKeeper will resume tracking hours.
Working through a break
If an unpaid break is deducted, but an employee doesn’t take it, they can submit a Time Addition Request via the app to request that break time be put back towards their hours.
Managing Paid Breaks
With paid breaks, there's a couple of options in TimeKeeper depending on your business requirements.
No requirement to track paid breaks:
Breaks can be treated simply as clocked in time.
Staff clock in in the morning and clock out in the evening.
There's no visibility of breaks on the timesheet.
Requirement to see who is on their break at a given time:
(requires Job feature/TimeKeeper Pro)
Set up 'Break' as a non geofenced Job for staff to switch to.
See here how to set up a job and how to switch between jobs.
This means that the time spent on lunch is added to the timesheet. See below how this would appear.
Requirement to see which job a lunch break is linked to
(requires Job & Activities features/TimeKeeper Pro)
Go to the global account settings and enable 'Require Activity on Clock In'.
Set up 'Lunch Break' as an Activity within a Job.
Employees clock into the required Job and Activity, then switch to the 'Lunch Break' Activity when required.
Guide here on Tracking Time Against Activities
If you have any further questions, please reach out to [email protected]