Canadian Labor Compliance
To remain compliant with the regional labor requirements for restaurants, employers in Canada must take certain measures to ensure they are scheduling in a compliant manner.
In this article, you'll learn how to enable Canadian labor compliance in 7shifts, understand the types of labor exceptions, and run reports to help you stay compliant.
Things to know
Important: Managers/Assistant Managers require permissions "Can manage time punches", "Can manage exceptions", and "Can run reports" to view and make edits to time punches and exceptions.
- Access to labor compliance features may require an upgrade from your current 7shifts plan.
- The Labor Exceptions report is only available when using 7punches or a POS labor integration.
- Reporting Pay hours do not contribute to calculating hours worked, such as overtime hours.
- If rounding rules have been enabled for 7punches, this may affect shifts eligible for Reporting Pay and the costs associated.
Enable labor compliance
- Log in as an Admin on the web app.
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In the left navigation bar, head to Settings (or, hover over your profile photo) > Company Settings.
Tip: Setting your Labor Compliance Rules here at the Company level will apply these settings to your entire Company (all locations) by default.
If you need to set or customize these compliance options for specific locations, you can do so by navigating to the Locations settings for the relevant location and modifying the Labor & Compliance section there.
Learn how to set Location-Level Settings here: Labor & Compliance Settings - Select the Labor & Compliance tab.
- Under Jurisdiction, select a province:
- Review and set your overtime, break, custom break, and wages & pay settings.
- Under the Advanced Labor section, compliance settings will automatically populate as per the Jurisdiction set earlier. Checkmark the options according to your preferences:
- Be sure to hit Save to complete these changes!
- To restore default settings (including Overtime rules), click Re-sync labor & compliance settings:
Types of exceptions in Canada
Reporting Pay
Reporting Pay compensates employees who report to work as scheduled but are sent home before the end of their shift. These employees are entitled to pay for a minimum number of unworked hours based on their province. 7shifts will automatically identify and flag shifts where reporting pay applies.
Supported Jurisdictions:
- Alberta and New Brunswick require the greater of 3 hours at minimum wage or the regular wage for actual hours worked.
- British Columbia requires a minimum of 2 hours at the regular wage, or 4 hours if the shift was originally scheduled for more than 8 hours.
- Manitoba requires a minimum of 3 hours at the regular wage, not exceeding the original shift length.
- Ontario, PEI, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland & Labrador require a minimum of 3 hours at the regular wage.
- Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon require a minimum of 4 hours at the regular wage.
- Nova Scotia requires a minimum of 3 hours at the minimum wage.
- Canada Federal requires a top-up to 3 hours at the regular rate if the employee works fewer than 3 consecutive hours.
You can find more information on Canada's Reporting Pay regulations here.
Note: Provincial jurisdictions can use the Canada Federal setting for Reporting Pay without changing their location's Jurisdiction setting to Canada Federal. Most restaurants follow Provincial or Territorial rules. Only select Federal if your employees are federally regulated.
Right to Rest
The Right to Rest rule (sometimes called "Clopen") ensures employees have a minimum amount of time off between shifts. If an employee is scheduled for a shift within a certain number of hours of their previous shift ending, 7shifts will flag this as an exception to make you aware.
While exception warnings will appear during scheduling, in time clocking, and on the Labor Exceptions Report for visibility and compliance tracking, no additional costs or "premium pay" fees are calculated for Right to Rest exceptions in our reporting. This is a notification-only feature designed to help you schedule safely and remain aware of potential compliance gaps.
Supported Jurisdictions:
- Canada Federal is currently the only jurisdiction supported for Right to Rest. An employee must receive 8 hours rest between shifts.
Note: 7shifts currently detects consecutive day shifts, but does not detect split shifts occurring on the same day.
View exception warnings
Once an exception has been enabled, it will automatically appear for Admins and Managers in the following areas:
To avoid/reduce exceptions, you will be warned about potential exceptions as you make changes to your schedule. Each time you make a change to a shift that causes one or more exceptions, a warning modal will appear indicating the type of exception and the associated cost (if any).
Before publishing a schedule, view a summary of potential exceptions, costs, and details. Once published, each exception appears in the report.
Once published, the exception will be recorded in the report. Changing a shift multiple times can incur an exception each time, so be sure to consider the costs before making last-minute schedule changes.
You will also see a warning when assigning shifts through the Shift Pool that could cause an exception:
On the Time Clocking page as an exception warning:
On a Punch Overview:
Admins and Managers/Assistant Managers (with permissions) can click on the warning to further dismiss/restore an exception warning:
The Worked Hours and Wages Report:
Similarly, you can export the report directly from a closed timesheet:
The Labor Exceptions Report:
The Punch Audit Report, when the exception has been dismissed: