Tracking Worker Lunches

Some employers like to track the time workers are spending on their lunch breaks even though it's unpaid. You may want to do this for a variety of reasons, but the two most common are to make sure phone coverage or customer care is being adequately provided for, and the other is to make sure employees are not abusing their lunch breaks by taking excessive time away from the office.

The lunch tracking feature in your computer time clock software makes tracking worker lunch breaks easy to do. The first thing is to verify that lunch breaks are set up according to your business rules.

1. From the Tools menu of your Virtual TimeClock software, choose Time Calculations.
2. Change the worker lunch label if you'd like to be more explicit (like 'Unpaid Lunch').
3. Verify lunch calculations are unpaid.

Now instead of stopping work to go on a lunch break, employees can click the Lunch icon on the toolbar in the main time clock window. Their status will change to 'Lunch'. When they come back from lunch, they simply double-click their name, pick what activity they're returning to, and enter their password. Time spent at lunch will be recorded in a separate 'Unpaid' column on your worker timecard reports.

If you don't want employees to use the lunch tracking feature, then you can remove it within your program preferences.

1. From the Virtual TimeClock menu on Mac, or the Edit menu on Windows PCs, choose Preferences.
2. Click the User Access tab.
3. Uncheck Worker Lunch in the Toolbar Buttons section and save.

Maggie Hofer

Customer Service Team

Redcort Software