Meal Break Penalty Setting in Time & Attendance
If you live in a state where you're penalized if you don't give your employees a lunch break, the meal break penalty setting is for you. For example, employers in California are typically required to pay out an extra hour of pay if their employee does not take a meal break before their 5th hour of work.
Who can use meal break penalties?
Any company using Zenefits Payroll can enable this for their workers using Time & Attendance.
How do I enable meal break penalty?
- Go to the Time & Attendance app from your Zenefits admin account.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click the Meal Breaks tab.
- Under the Meal Breaks Penalty section, click the Edit icon.
- Enable the setting, and Save.
*Note that in order to use meal break penalties, you must have the meal break status enabled. This way, the Zenefits system knows what time employees have missed their expected meal break time. Once meal break status is enabled, meal break penalty can also be enabled.
What happens once meal break penalty is enabled?
Once this setting is enabled, every time an employee does not adhere to your meal break status hours, you'll see only 1 hour of meal break pay seamlessly transition to payroll each day there's a missed or insufficient meal break. All of this information ends up in the Summary Report which can be accessed from the Reports tab of Time & Attendance.