How to apply lunch policy to continuous hours only

[jessew]

I am in a university setting and use TimeTrex to schedule and track attendance for our part-time student employees.

The campus policy requires that a student take a 30 minute break after 6 consecutive hours worked in a given shift. If the student doesn't punch out for a 30 minute break before they reach 6 hours, we need TimeTrex to do that automatically. The system should NOT deduct 30 minutes unless the students has reached 6 consecutive hours and hasn't punched out for a lunch.

I thought that the auto-deduct meal policy would do this properly, so I set it up as follows:

Policy Name: Required Lunch
Type: Auto-Deduct
Active After: 6.00 hours
Start Window: 5.00 hours
Window Length: 1.00 hours

Here's the snag: One of my employees works a split shift. The first half of her shift is 4 hours, then she is gone for 3 hours, then she works another 3 hours. TimeTrex automatically deducted a 30 minute lunch from her total time, even though there was a 3 hour break between the halves of the shift which, in our situation, satisfies the lunch requirement.

My question is, how to I get my meal policy to apply the 30 minute lunch requirement only to consecutive hours worked in a given shift, instead of the total hours worked across shifts? In other words, how to I avoid applying it in circumstances like the split shift I described above. We have a lot of students who work like that, and the time between halves of the shift is always at least 1.5 hours, but could be as many as 8 hours.

What are the best settings for the meal policy to best match the actual university policy I outlined above?

Thanks in advance for your help!!

Jesse

[shaunw]

Currently TimeTrex has no concept of "consecutive hours" when it comes to the meal policy. There are a couple ways you can solve this issue though, one way is to remove the meal policy from the policy groups, and create at least two schedule policies. One with a meal policy assigned to it, and one without a meal policy.

Now, you will need to create schedules for each student and any one who works a split shift you will want to select the "No Lunch" schedule policy, and ones who don't work a split shift you will want to select the "30min Lunch" schedule policy.

This allows you to control the meal policy on a day by day, shift by shift basis, rather then assigning the meal policy to a policy group and have it apply to all students all the time.

If you don't want to bother with schedules for students, simply ask the ones who work split shifts to punch out for "lunch" when they leave, and back in from lunch when they come back. Now if you selected the "Include Any Punched Time for Lunch" checkbox in the meal policy (assigned to the policy group), TimeTrex will see they already took a lunch and it won't deduct anymore time.