Trackable meal policy

In this topic, you'll learn how to set up trackable meal break settings for your MobiClocks environment. Using the trackable meal policy, you let your employees track their meal breaks manually. Trackable meal settings are highly customizable, and you can customize the duration of the meal break and how often it is provided, configure Personal App notifications and flags for different cases, and more.

If the trackable meal policy is activated, employees track their meal breaks through Personal App or Kiosk App. This means that they start a meal break and end it. The meal break duration is then added to their daily timelogs. See the Manually track a meal break topic to learn how meal breaks are tracked in Personal App.

To set up a trackable meal policy in Web App, navigate to Administration () > Settings > Meal & Rest Break, enable Meal break policy, and select the Trackable meal policy option. The Trackable meal policy tab contains all the meal break settings, which are discussed next.

The following screenshot shows the trackable meal policy settings page.

Settings

In the Settings section, you have the following options:

• Provide a break for every X hours. Specify how frequently the employees are provided a meal break.
• Allocated break duration. Select the break duration that is allocated for each employee.
• Prevent ending early. If this setting is enabled, the employee is not allowed to end the break earlier than the specified break duration.

For example, if you've chosen to provide a break for every 5 hours of work and have specified the break duration as 30 minutes, employees have the opportunity to take a 30-minute break any time during the 5-hour work duration.

Depending on your organization's policy, you can flag missed meal breaks and other cases, which are discussed later in this topic under the Flags section.

On break start

Here, you can apply additional requirements for starting a meal break.

• Require identification. If face recognition is enabled, the employees are required to take a photo of themselves and get identified before they are able to start the break. If face recognition is not enabled, employees must enter their employee number.
• Geofence lock. If the setting is enabled, employees can start a break only if they are within the job site's geofence zone.

On break end

Similar to On break start settings, here you can apply additional requirements for ending a break. The same options are available.

Reminder

You can notify the employees through Personal App that the meal break is about to start or end. You also have the option to choose how many minutes in advance the employee is reminded before the start or before the end of the break.

For example, consider the following case. You have configured your meal break settings to provide a 30-minute break for every 5 hours of work, and you have set to remind employees 10 minutes before the break starts and 5 minutes before the break ends. In this case, if after 4 hours and 20 minutes of work, an employee hasn't started a break yet, they will receive a meal break start reminder. Additionally, they will receive a meal break end reminder 25 minutes after starting a break.

Meal break calculations when working across multiple job sites

When an employee works at more than one job site in a single day, meal break flags and calculations are evaluated at the day level rather than per job site. The system aggregates all worked hours across all job sites for that employee and applies a single merged policy for the day.

Daily worked time

The daily worked time total includes all worked durations from timelogs across all job sites, regardless of whether the job site uses a trackable or fixed meal break policy. The following are excluded from the calculation:

• Leave entries
• Split entries
• Meal and rest breaks

Policy resolution

When timelogs span multiple job sites with different meal break policies, the system determines a single effective policy for the day using the following priority order:

1. If any job site has a trackable meal break policy, the trackable policy applies for the day.
2. If no trackable job sites are present, but at least one has a fixed meal break policy, the fixed policy applies.
3. If all job sites have meal break policy disabled, no policy is applied.

When multiple job sites all have a trackable policy, the system resolves individual settings as follows:

Flags

In this section, you can enable flags for the following cases:

• Missed meal break: Apply the flag if the employee's total daily worked time meets the break threshold but no qualifying break was taken. The flag is evaluated against the policy resolved from all trackable job sites for the day, as described in Policy resolution.

  If a fixed meal break exists on any of the employee's job sites for the day, it counts toward satisfying the meal break requirement and suppresses the flag.

  The flag is assigned to a timelog in a trackable job site. If the timelog that crossed the threshold uses a trackable policy, the flag is assigned there. Otherwise, it is assigned to the first created trackable timelog for the day.

• Short meal break: Apply the flag if the employee's break duration is shorter than the
  specified break duration.

• Late meal break: Apply the flag if the employee took a meal break after the configured threshold. Worked time leading up to the break is totaled across all job sites using the exclusions described in Daily worked time, and evaluated against the policy resolved as described in Policy resolution. Breaks at job sites with a fixed meal break policy do not satisfy the late meal break check, though the worked time from those job sites is included in the total. The flag is assigned to the timelog where the meal break occurred.

• Unfinished meal break: Apply the flag if the employee hasn't ended the meal before punching out.

Supervisor notifications

In the Supervisor notifications section, you notify supervisors about employees' upcoming meal breaks, giving them time to send employees to break before it becomes late or missed. Supervisor notifications don't affect flags or any timelog calculation. Once a meal break deadline has passed, no notification is sent; the existing missed and late meal break flags handle that instead.

To enable supervisor notifications, turn on the Supervisor notifications toggle, then configure the following options:

• Notification Methods. Choose how supervisors are alerted: Push (delivered to Personal App), SMS, or both. At least one method is required.

  📘

  NOTE

  If SMS messaging isn't active for your environment, the SMS option is unavailable.

• Notify before meal break. Choose how many minutes before the meal break deadline supervisors are alerted: 30 min, 15 min, or 5 min. Select one or more.

• Recipient roles. Choose which field roles receive the alert. Only front-end roles are available. See Role permissions to learn more about roles.

Who receives a notification

A supervisor receives a supervisor notification only when, at the moment it's sent, they:

• Are assigned to the job site.
• Hold one of the selected recipient roles.
• Are punched in at that job site.
• Can be reached on the selected notification method: a valid mobile number for SMS, or a registered device with push permission enabled for Push.

If a supervisor is themselves due for a meal break, they're included in the count of their own notification.

What the notification looks like

Each notification names the job site and groups employees by how much time is left before their meal break deadline, without listing employee names. For example:

Job site name
Employees due for a meal break:

• 1 in 0–5 min
• 2 in 10–15 min
• 2 in 25–30 min

An employee is included in a group once, the first time they enter it, and isn't included again until they move into a narrower time window. If no employee enters a new group since the last check, no notification is sent.

Supervisors are notified for every meal break required during the shift, not only the first, and there's no daily limit. Notifications for an employee stop as soon as they start their break, end it, or punch out. The countdown follows the employee's worked time and continues across job sites and midnight, using the same logic as the missed and late meal break flags. An employee is only counted at the job site where they're currently punched in.

Channels

• SMS. Sent through your environment's SMS capability and follows the same phone number and consent rules as other outbound SMS. This requires the SMS module to be active and consumes SMS segments included with your account. Blocked numbers (unverified, opted out, or suspended) don't receive the notification, and show as BLOCKED in SMS logs. Sent supervisor notifications appear in n SMS logs with Sent by set to System and a dedicated notification type, so you can filter for them.
• Push. Sent to the supervisor's Personal App. A supervisor without a registered device or without push permission enabled simply doesn't receive the notification. There's no per-recipient opt-out for push notifications.

Default for all newly created job sites

If this checkbox is selected, the configured meal break settings are only applied to newly created job sites, not affecting existing job sites.