Configuring Breaks

Configuring Breaks

This guide is designed to help you configure your break set up in TimeKeeper.

In TimeKeeper, we have two types of breaks, Day Breaks or Flexi-Breaks. These are both unpaid breaks. The purpose of this feature is to allow employees to clock in at the start of their work, clock out at the end of their work and TimeKeeper takes care of automatically deducting the relevant break for that employee.

Note: Flexi breaks are not cumulative. If there are two flexi breaks - one deducting 15 minutes after 4 hours and another deducting 30 minutes after 6 hours worked - only the 30-minute break would be deducted when an employee works 8 hours.

Day Breaks

A Day Break is a break that occurs at the same time every day.

Flexi Breaks

A flexi break is automatically deducted by TimeKeeper after an employee works a specific number of hours in a day, rather than at a fixed time. For example, a 30-minute break might be applied after 4 hours worked, or 45 minutes after 6 hours.

What happens if my employee has a break being auto deducted but they didn't take a break that day?

If an auto-deducted break is configured but the employee doesn’t take it, they can submit a Time Addition Request via the app.

As seen above, there's an option to exclude a break on specific days. You can click the day under "Don't Apply Break on These Days". This feature allows you to prevent breaks from applying on certain days, like weekends.

Irregular Breaks

If automated break features like Day Breaks or Flexi-Breaks aren't suitable, you may require employees to clock in and out for breaks. If an employee clocks out, they will not be paid for that time. Upon returning and clocking in, TimeKeeper will resume tracking hours.

Paid Breaks

With paid breaks, there's a couple of options in TimeKeeper depending on your business requirements.

No requirement to track paid breaks

• Breaks can be treated simply as clocked in time.
• Staff clock in in the morning and clock out in the evening.
• There's no visibility of breaks on the timesheet.

Requirement to see who is on their break at a given time.

• Set up 'Break' as a non geofenced Job for staff to switch to.
• See here how to set up a job and how to switch between jobs.
• This means that the time spent on lunch is added to the timesheet. See below how this would appear.

Requirement to see which job a lunch break is linked to.

• Go to the global account settings and enable 'Require Activity on Clock In'.
• Set up 'Lunch Break' as an Activity within a Job.
• Guide here on Tracking Time Against Activities

• The time spent on lunch is added to the timesheet.
• Furthermore, lunch breaks will be visibly tied to their respective jobs. See below how this would look on the timesheet.

We hope this article will help you to configure your break setup - any questions at all, please reach out to us at support@timekeeper.co.uk

Updated on: 06/08/2025