A Guide to Lunch and Break Settings Follow
With uAttend you can track and manage your employees' lunch and break with ease. This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about setting up and managing lunch and breaks for your employees.
Use the table of contents below to skip to specific sections or click links within this article to access how-to articles, troubleshooting help, downloadable resources, and more.
In this article:
- Who can update lunch and break settings?
- Configuring Lunch and Break Settings
- Setting Up Employees to Clock for Lunch and Break
- Break and Lunch Clocking Guides by Time Clock Series
Who can update lunch and break settings?
Administrators are able to update lunch and break settings for all departments. Supervisors can be configured with permissions in their profile to view and/or edit departments. Their responsibility can also be limited to certain departments by updating their Responsible Departments setting.
Configuring Lunch and Break Settings
Lunch and Break settings are set at the department level and apply to all employees within the department. To update the settings, you navigate to the Departments tab and set the lunch and break settings in the General sub-tab.
There are a few important things to note when setting up lunch and break settings.
- Department-level settings and rules are inherited from the employee's home department. Regardless of the department the employee is working in, the lunch settings will always be that of their home department.
- Any lunch on the time card should be set to the home department to prevent timecard calculation issues.
- Lunch settings, like lunch lockouts, will not be applied to clockings that were manually added to the timecard.
The Department's General settings are broken into three sections: General, Lunch Clockings, and Break Clockings.
General Section
The General section covers items such as the department name, code, and status as well as three settings that will affect lunches and breaks:
- Clocking Rounding
- Lunch Deduction/Duration
- Paid Break/Duration
Rounding and Grace: Any clocking rounding rules will apply to all employee clockings, including break and lunch. Check out our article on Clocking Rounding for more information and to see if this setting should be adjusted to fit your company policies.
Other Deduction/Duration: The Lunch Deduction/Duration setting is used for automatic lunch deductions, meaning employees will not need to clock for their lunch breaks. Automatic lunch deductions cannot be edited or deleted on a timecard. We cover automatic deductions more in-depth in our Automatic Lunch Break Options article.
Paid Break/Duration: The Paid Break/Duration setting is used when employees clock out for breaks but don't use the break clock option. In this case, their time out will be deducted, but you'll still pay for their breaks. It's commonly used when employees clock out for breaks on timeclocks that do not have a break clock option, allowing you to track break times and still pay employees according to your company's policies.
Lunch Clocks Section
The Lunch Clocks section covers settings that only apply when an employee clocks in and out for lunch. Here, you can configure whether lunch is paid or unpaid, set how much of the lunch is paid, prevent employees from clocking back from lunch early.
Paid vs. Unpaid Lunches
The uAttend system will not automatically deduct lunches unless you enable the Deduct Lunch Clocks from the Time Card option. Once enabled, this feature deducts the time they take for lunch. If you pay for your employees' lunch, regardless of its length, leave this setting disabled. Alternatively, if you only pay for a set amount of lunch time, use the Add Up To option to specify how much time is paid in Hours and Minutes (HH:MM).
Prevent Early Returns from Lunch
To prevent employees from returning early from lunch, enable the Lunch Lockout option. Once enabled, you can set the Lunch Lockout Duration in Hours and Minutes (HH:MM), ensuring employees cannot end their lunch until the set time has passed.
Break Clocks Section
In the uAttend system, breaks are paid by default. The settings in the Break Clocks section allow you to customise how break time is handled in two key ways.
Add Up To: The Add Up To option lets you set a maximum amount of time that is paid for each break in hours and minutes (HH:MM). This time limit will apply to each break when employees use the break clock feature on the smartphone app, web portal, or any timeclocks that have the break clock option. Any time over the set time will be deducted on their time card. For example, if you only want to pay for 15-minute breaks, enable the Add Up To option and enter the time as 00:15 (HH:MM), any time taken after 15 minutes will be deducted.
Break Lockout: The Break Lockout setting prevents employees from returning from their break early. Once enabled, you can set the lockout duration in hours and minutes (HH:MM). If an employee attempts to clock before the set time, they will receive an error or notice preventing them from doing so.
If your company does not pay for breaks, employees can simply clock out and clock back in without using the break clock option. To learn more about our break options, check out this article: Break Options
Setting Up Employees to Clock for Lunches and Breaks
In order for an employee to clock in the web portal, smartphone app, or on a timeclock, you will need to set them up with the necessary permissions.
- Authentication for web clocking
- Authentication for mobile app clocking
- Authentication for timeclock clocking
No additional settings will need to be enabled to clock for lunches or breaks, as these features are built into the portal, mobile app, and some models of timeclocks. There is no way to remove or hide the lunch and/or break clock option from the portal, smartphone app, or any timeclock.
Break and Lunch Clock Guides by Time Clock Series
The exact steps needed to clock on the timeclock will vary based on your model; we have linked the steps here for each model for your convenience.
DR Models: DR2000, DR2500
- How-to guides for your employees (DR2500, DR2000)
- Clocking for Breaks on a DR2500 or DR2000 Timeclock
JR Model: JR2000
BN Models: BN6000, BN6500
CB Models: CB6000, CB6500