With TimeForge, employers can easily track meal penalties and automatically apply compensation toward an employee's regular hours. This is useful for those employers who do not care to differentiate regular hours and a lunch break.
Alternatively, you can track meal penalties separately from regular hours. Both options are easy to configure. Here's how to set up meal penalties, then how to interpret your attendance report based on your chosen settings.
Configure meal penalties
Go to the Attendance Options page
Open the Attendance tab and select Attendance Options.
Locate the meal penalties options under the Calculations section
Meal penalties options are located under the Calculations section.
Select whether to include meal penalties as regular time
- By selecting Yes, you are telling TimeForge to add meal penalties as regular hours.
- If you select No, you are telling TimeForge to keep these hours separate from regular hours.
If you select Yes, you can also specify whether to count penalties toward overtime.
What it means for your Attendance reports
Now that you've configured your meal penalties, here's how to interpret your attendance reports.
If TimeForge is configured to include meal penalties as regular hours...
The report will add the number of hours you entered into the employees meal penalty to their regular hours.
For example, Craig Anderson worked an 8 hour shift, but we added 1 hour as compensation for a meal penalty. So, that extra hour gets added to his regular hours, which is why we see 9 hours worked on the report.
If TimeForge does NOT include meal penalties as regular hours...
The report will not add the number of hours you entered into the employees' meal penalty to their regular hours.
For example, Craig Anderson worked an 8 hour shift, but we added 1 hour as compensation for a meal penalty. However, in this example, we didn't want that meal to count towards his regular hours, so the meal penalty doesn't get added, which is why we see 8 hours.