One topic with ClockOn that we have a fair few queries about is how breaks are treated when employees clock times and how the system handles them to assign them to timesheets, as well as how they will be processed when it comes to payroll.
This article contains the following items to help explain how this works within ClockOn, as well as how you can set the configuration to work optimally for your company.
- How the system allocates clocked breaks
- Paid vs Unpaid
- Payment of breaks
- Auto set the paid option for short breaks
- Break auto-creation settings
- Examples of how breaks are represented
How the system allocates clocked breaks
The assignment for clocked breaks will depend on the settings from within the employee's attached ruleset, this can be identified from the Pay Tab in the employee details screen.
Once identified, open the details for that ruleset and view the Breaks section
This screen will show the options that will control where the breaks will sit once they are clocked against a timesheet
Time windows for breaks
This controls the threshold for what will qualify for a break, based off the rostered end time for the break.
For example,
If a break is rostered for 12:00 - 13:00 with this setting at 50%, then for the clocked break to qualify for this, it will need to end before 13:30.
In the event that the break is outside of this window, then the system will either clock an additional break, or if the employee is not allowed to do non-rostered clock times, it will ignore the time. If the time is ignored the following setting will be necessary to provide an alert to the user if a correction is needed.
Alert time window for breaks
Works in the same way as the previous setting, however, rather than controlling the break times, this will instead add alerts into the system if a break is clocked outside of the considered window. Alerts are shown within the Message Center
Minimum time for rostered break
This details the minimum percentage of time that is required for a break to be considered for a rostered break. for example if a 60-minute break is used and this is set to 50% then the clocked break time will need to be at least 30 minutes long to qualify.
Rostered break time vs actual clocked times
The rostered timings need to be taken into consideration when determining whether or not a break is overdue when a clock time is recorded against it, for example, if a rostered shift starts at 12:00 and finishes at 12:30, the overdue note for the time window for breaks setting will be based on the end of the rostered break
In this example, if the setting is 25% then for a 30-minute break the max it will allow is 7.5 min, so if the time is prior to 12:37 then it will align successfully if the break was taken later there may be miss-alignments.
The break time windows are is covered in this article in the examples section.
Paid vs Unpaid
You can determine whether the employees are to have all their breaks to be considered as paid, unpaid, or custom through the Ruleset settings using the dropdown as indicated below
If this option is set as User Defined, the breaks will be defaulted to unpaid, however, this gives the added ability for users to be able to toggle the paid status from within the break itself.
Within payroll breaks will display either as gaps between costings for unpaid break portions or using the Payroll description text to show the breakdowns.
Payment of breaks
ClockOn gives users the option to use either the rostered or actual (clocked) times for the payment of breaks.
To illustrate this the following example uses a rostered break of 12- 1 pm and actual clock times of 2-3 pm
Within payroll with the rostered time set, the break will show as being between the 12 and 1 pm timeframe.
If set to actual time, then the clock times will be used instead
PLEASE NOTE: This is a simple example to demonstrate how the breaks will show within payroll and the actual times for breaks are rarely this consistent and as such may need some analysis through the timesheet screen if there are suspected time issues.
Auto set the paid option for short breaks
Another available option is for the system to auto-set the paid tick in the event that it is considered a short break.
This option is designed to work for both paid and unpaid break times.
An example of its use is if by your employee's agreements they are entitled to have a 10-minute paid break, you could use the configuration below to state that if the break is less than 11 minutes in length, include it as a paid break by default.
PLEASE NOTE: Assuming that the payment of breaks option is set to either unpaid or user defined, if the employee exceeds the minimum length set on this screen the system will revert the break back to be unpaid.
Break auto-creation settings
As it is a common award condition to provide employees with a break if they work over a certain number of hours within a shift ClockOn provides this as a default setting in the system. The threshold for this setting as well as the length of the default break can be customized as per below
The threshold for the default break is set within the Departments screen with the following settings
With the above setting, if a shift is created where its length is 4 hours or longer a break will be auto-added to the shift.
In conjunction with this, if the "Add/remove breaks when sizing" option is enabled, the system will control the add/remove of this break when changing the shift size within the roster screen.
If you want to prevent employees within this department from getting a break assigned to them simply set this to a higher value.The length of the auto-created break can be controlled in two ways
- As a global option for all employees within the Location setup
- As a pre-employee option within their employee profiles (overrides the default if applied)
Location screen
To set or adjust the global option for all of the employees within a location, follow the steps below
- Open the Locations list
- Open the location edit screen
- Select the tab labeled Other and view/or adjust the Break Length setting
Employee screen
To set an override for individual employees first open their Employee Details screen
Then set the Default Break / Non-rostered Break setting to a value greater than 0.
PLEASE NOTE: When adjusting these settings please be aware that the changes will only affect newly created shifts. Shifts generated prior to this point or applied from a roster template will retain their previous break settings.
Examples of how breaks are represented
Below is a representation of a 60 min rostered break that has not been clocked in the system.
In this state, the between times are editable so the user can adjust where they would like to place the break within the range of the employee's shift.
Once a time has been clocked to the break and allocated based on the rules from the ruleset, the layout of the break with change as per below.
- The upper portion of the shift represents the pre-set rostered time for the break on the shift
- The lower portion represents the times that the employee has clocked against the break
The system will attempt to place the breaks in the correct ordering, however, if you are rostering several breaks in a day, it is better to try and ensure that the rostered times are relatively close to when you expect the employees to take the time off.
If they are too far out issues with the alignments may occur as demonstrated below.The system will work with "Best Guess" logic using the total time of the break to determine which break to align the clocked times to, for example, if the employee clocks their rostered break early or late, the system can still try to match up the times.
Now we will go into some instances of how the system handles the incoming times. For these examples, we are going to use a 25% time window for breaks, as well as a 50%.
This will mean that a 60-minute break will need to be at least 30 minutes long to qualify, and extend no longer than 15 min after the roster break end time.
In the following example, the employee had a 60 min break but their time clocked was only 29 minutes, thus not meeting the 30-minute minimum. As a result, the system has added an additional break instead to ensure that the break times are retained.
In the example below the employee took way too long to finish their break, and as a result, a similar situation has occurred where there is an additional break instance on the timesheet.
Multiple breaks
In the following example, there are two rostered breaks, one 10 min, and another 30 min.
They are using the same ruleset settings as before (25% time window and 50% minimum rostered window) therefore the following applies
- The 10-minute break needs to be clocked at least 5 minutes in length and no greater than 12.5 minutes in length
- The 30-minute break needs to be clocked at least 15 minutes and no greater than 45 minutes in length
If the employee clocked both an 11-minute and 29-minute break, the following will show on the timesheet
In the following example, the employee clocked 30-minutes for his 10-minute shift which was the earlier of the two the result is that the first break was not matched correctly and would cause a cascading issue through the rest of the breaks
To detail what is happening here,
- The first break was to commence at 10 am for 10 minutes, the employee clocked to start this break, however, took too long and instead took 30 minutes, which resulted in the second break is started instead.
- Due to the employee clocking their next break at 12 they qualified for the timing for the second break (based on the rostered shift end time of 12:30) and the second break was completed.
- The remaining time was left over without an available timeslot to fill so was therefore used to start a new break.
In the following example, the employee was to clock 30 minutes for his 10-minute shift which was the later of the two the result is that the first break was not matched correctly and would cause a cascading issue through the rest of the breaks
To detail what is happening here,
- The first break was successfully clocked and completed
- The second break was started, however, the end time was exceeded, so the time was not entered against that break and a new record was created instead.
PLEASE NOTE: If these scenarios occur, the only way to correct them is to note down the times and manually re-create the break time.