Meal and rest break tracking helps businesses monitor and enforce compliance with labor laws related to employee breaks. It allows employers to set up, track, and report on mandated meal and rest periods during work shifts, ensuring that employees take the necessary time away from work as required by state and federal regulations.
This feature is especially important for HR managers, payroll administrators, and business owners who need to maintain accurate records and prevent costly legal issues related to break time violations.
Why are rest and meal breaks a thing?
Most state regulations around meal breaks are designed to benefit employees by ensuring they have adequate rest during their work shifts. This helps prevent fatigue, reduces stress, and improves overall productivity. Meal break laws protect employees from being overworked by ensuring they have a minimum amount of time to rest during long shifts. This helps to prevent exploitation and promotes a fair work environment.
State regulations provide a legal framework that employees can rely on if their right to meal breaks is violated. This gives employees the power to report violations and seek remedies, protecting them from potential employer misconduct. As an employer you can protect your business by keeping track of rest and meal breaks on their Eddy time sheet.
How to enable meal and rest breaks in Eddy
Break Settings for meal breaks and rest breaks are part of Eddy's time tracking policies. Because break rules can impact payroll and pay calculations, you can only add or edit break settings when the time tracking policy is new or has not yet been used to finalize a pay period.
1. Create a new time tracking policy
The 4th section in the process of creating a time tracking policy defines the policy's break settings. If you have workers in multiple states, you'll want to define a policy for each state that has unique break rules. You can see a summary of each state's rules here.
2. Meal Break Settings
The meal break settings options in our software offer a range of customizable features designed to help you tailor break policies to meet your organization’s specific needs while ensuring compliance with state and federal regulations.
- Meal break rules allow you to determine how many hours must be worked before the break is required. (this can vary from 5-8 hours)
- You can define the length of the meal break (most states require 30 minutes)
- The meal break can be paid or unpaid. Most regulations indicate that the break can be unpaid only when a worker is relieved from all work duties.
For example, in California workers must receive an uninterrupted 30-minute unpaid meal break when working more than five hours in a day. To set this up in Eddy you specify 5 hours as the time worked and 30 minutes as the duration of the break. Select unpaid.
Because a few states restrict the timing of when meal breaks can be taken, Eddy offers a few additional settings:
Restrictions based on amount of time workedSome states (Connecticut and Delaware) specify that the meal break must take place between the first two and last two hours of the shift.
Restrictions based on start of work period
Other states (such as Washington, Illinois, and Kentucky) require that the meal break cannot occur at some point in time after the work day begins.
Penalties for missed breaks
California defines a penalty if an appropriate break is not taken. "If an employer fails to provide an employee a meal period in accordance with an applicable IWC Order, the employer must pay one additional hour of pay at the employee's regular rate of pay for each workday that the meal period is not provided. This additional hour is not counted as hours worked for purposes of overtime calculations."
Note: when the penalty option is selected, Eddy will automatically add earnings equal to one hour's pay for the affected worker as a miscellaneous pay item during the Run Payroll flow. This option is only available for customers using Eddy Payroll.
To set this up for California, check the Add a penalty box.
3. Assign workers to the time tracking policy
Any people you assign to a time tracking policy that has meal or rest breaks enabled will see the option to take breaks on their hours card when they next are clocked in.
Missed Break Penalties
When an appropriate break is not shown on a person's time sheet, Eddy will automatically apply a penalty during the run payroll flow.
Time sheet approval process
The time sheet approval process shows managers responsible for approving hours when a meal break has been missed.
Correcting time sheet errors
If missed breaks were taken the manager or HR admin can edit the time sheet to add or edit break information. the manager can add a note or upload a file to provide documentation for the change.
Missed break penalty is applied in the Run Payroll flow
Any missed break penalty that is in the time sheet when it is time to run payroll is applied during the Run Payroll flow.
The Payroll UI will show an alert for each worker when a break penalty exists.
Eddy adds the penalty as a miscellaneous pay item on the Extra Earnings tab.
- In the Run Payroll Flow we will show a penalty for missed breaks only if the Show Penalty in Payroll option is enabled in Time Tracking Policy Settings.
- We have two penalty options: Meal Break and Rest Break. In the run payroll flow we’ll combine these and add the hours (since the penalty is the same).
- In the run payroll flow we add a miscellaneous pay item for any worker who has missed one or more meal OR rest break during the pay period. This extra earning amount is equal to one hour of pay for each break missed per work day.
Taking Breaks
Employees can start and end breaks wherever they can clock in and out. They will see a Start break button when they are clocked in.
Ending a break early
The employee can end a break at any time. This is important since some states require them to be able to clock back in if they are asked to resume duties early. But Eddy will ask them to confirm they want to end the break early with a reminder that the full break must be taken.
Break time is over
When the break time has ended, the mobile phone app will send a reminder push notification to the employee to let them know it is time to end the break. Eddy sends a reminder when the break time is reached, and if the user has not ended the break, another reminder is sent 10 minutes later.
The time clock card will also remind the user to end the break.
Hours card shows break history
The hours card shows workers a summary of all breaks taken during the day. Any break that was missed (or did not meet the break requirement rules) is tagged with an alert icon.
This same info is shown on each employee's time sheet.
Time Tracking Page
On the Time Tracking page we show a daily summary of all workers who are clocked in. On this page we'll show the history of any breaks taken or missed for each worker.
