Three Ways Your Software Should Support Meal and Rest Break Compliance
By capturing electronic timekeeping data with your software, you’re able to catch and prevent violations before they happen — something that isn’t possible with manual timekeeping.
Timekeeping is an everyday concern for cleaning and security companies. Your distributed teams are clocking in and out of shifts across multiple locations. Your supervisors can’t be everywhere at once to ensure breaks are being taken by the right people at the right times. This doesn’t just have an impact on your individual employees — it also has an impact on your business’s financial wellbeing when it comes to paying for meal and rest break compliance violations.
Understanding the impact of these laws is especially crucial for cleaning and security companies in California, where breaking meal and rest break laws can result in compensating employees for lost breaks with additional hours of pay. But timekeeping violations aren’t just a concern in California. Over half the states in the U.S. have some form of meal and rest laws in place. Here’s a list of three ways your software should support your business when it comes to meal and rest break compliance.
Timekeeping and Punch Types
Your meal and rest software should offer enhanced timekeeping and punch types to allow you to track your employee’s multiple unpaid and paid (otherwise known as on-duty) meals, and paid breaks. You should also be able to see actual in and out times, and view, edit, and clean up your collected data in efficient and helpful ways when punch data must be corrected.
Reporting
Look for software with useful and informative meal and rest reporting to help determine who is and who isn’t in compliance with your company and/or state’s meal and rest laws. Reporting should be flexible to allow you to identify any or all violations such as meals and breaks that have been missed, are too short or not taken in a timely manner. The identification of and premium (or penalty) payment of the violations you identify according to your business policies should be a simple, streamlined process.
Notifications
Your software should be able to send notifications to the right people at the right time to support your company’s meal and rest compliance and minimize premium payments to employees. To ensure lunch breaks are taken in a timely manner, look for focused notifications that alert supervisors if a meal hasn’t been started after a certain amount of time into a shift. Employees should also be notified if they’re checking back into work before their lunch or break is taken in full.
When used properly, a holistic software solution ensures you timekeeping is accurate, easy to manage and in compliance. TEAM Software is dedicated to ensuring our software solutions meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. While we’re committed to keeping you informed, it’s important to do your own research and consult your own legal and tax advisors with specific questions or concerns.