How to Handle Lunch Breaks

Grant Esser

Requiring employees to track their unpaid lunch time can be tedious for employees and burdensome for the administrators. Employees forget to clock out or in which means the administrator has to then manually fix their time. TimeClick® offers an Auto Lunch Deduction feature to make lunchtime a no-brainer for employees and administrators. Simply enter in the minimum number of hours an employee has to work to qualify for the deduction and TimeClick will automatically deduct your set number of minutes from your employee’s hours—no clocking out or clocking back in necessary.

Please note: Instructions for the updated version of TimeClick, version 2018, were added to this post in July of 2018. If you are interested in updating to version 2018, please contact our support team at support@timeclick.com or 435-753-4102 and we’ll go over upgrade details specific to your company.

To find your version, go to Help >> About TimeClick. In this post, we’ll call the newest version of TimeClick Version 2018 and all other versions of TimeClick that were released before the year 2018 Legacy versions.

Version 2018

In this version of TimeClick, the auto lunch deduction feature can be customized per individual or group of individuals rather than a “blanket” application of the feature like in the legacy versions.

Setup

To set up the auto lunch deduction,

1. Enter Admin mode
2. Navigate to Employees
3. Select an employee
4. Click the Clock Schedule tab found along the top of the employee profile
5. Mark the box “Enable Automatic Lunch Deduction”
6. Change the number of minutes to deduct and how long the employee must work for the time to be automatically deducted
7. Click OK to save your work.

Now, in our example, the employee will have 60 minutes automatically deducted from their schedule each day they work eight or more hours.

Apply to Multiple Employees

To have these exact same settings apply to multiple employees, simply scroll down in the same Clock Schedule window. You’ll see the button “Apply this clock schedule to multiple employees.”

When you click this, you can apply the settings to any employee you select on your list. If you do not see this button, you may be on an earlier version of TimeClick 2018. To update your version, use the instructions in this video.

View on Reports

Seeing the auto lunch deduction on the reports is easy. When running a report in the report center, you will see the option to view Auto Lunch Deductions in the Settings section of the Report Center. When you mark this box, it applies all the automatic deductions to the report totals.

Legacy Versions

The Legacy versions of TimeClick include LE 16, 12, SP1, LE, and version 10. Each of these versions uses the same instructions as shown below.

Setup

1. Enter Administration mode
2. Click Accruals & Misc.
3. Select Setup Auto Lunch Deduction

This screen allows you to set both the number of minutes that will automatically be deducted and the number of hours that an employee must work before the deduction is made. In this example, an employee has to work for a minimum of 4 hours before the program automatically takes 30 minutes off of that employee’s time for the day. Be sure to check the checkbox to activate the Auto Lunch Deduction.

If you would still like to keep track of the length of your employee’s lunch breaks, you can also have your employees use the paid break feature. Instead of clocking out or in, employees can select Begin Break and then Finish Break when they are back from lunch. This way, administrators can track their employees’ lunch hours without deducting the lunch break more than once.

View on Reports

TimeClick makes it easy to see the time deducted by Auto Lunch Deduction. The employee time card reports such as All Employee Hour and Overtime clearly show an employee’s Total Hours and right beneath it is the Hours After Lunch Deduction. This makes it very easy to see the difference between the total hours and the hours adjusted by the Auto Lunch Deduction if you need to make an adjustment manually.

Now you know the different strategies you can use to handle unpaid lunch breaks:

• Simply have employees clock out and back in for their lunch breaks
• Have the software take care of automatically taking the lunchtime from their total hours worked
• Track the total amount of time spent at lunch by having your employees use the break feature for lunchtime and use Auto Lunch Deduction simultaneously