Ensuring your employees are taking breaks is essential to staying labor compliant and can lead to increased productivity for you and your team. With this in mind, we’ve given you and your management team the ability to set breaks directly within an Employee’s shift. Being able to schedule paid and unpaid breaks directly will ensure you’ve got the right floor coverage at the right times. Admins have more customizations and can create custom break types. Once set, the breaks will appear on both the mobile and web app, acting as a visual cue of when your Employee should take their break.
As crucial as breaks are, it also isn't always a good idea to take a break. You'll want to cross-check your labour data and look at trends for when it would be an optimal time to schedule them. Ideally, this means not scheduling breaks during the busiest time of day, or when all hands are needed (like prep time!). Our intuitive system can point you in the right direction with our:
Labor Budget Tool
Optimal Labor Tool
⚠️ Admins can set up and create custom Break Types.
⚠️ Managers and Assistant Managers can add breaks to the Schedule. They will require permission: "Can manage schedules".
⚠️ Scheduled breaks do not sync or surface on integrated POSs.
⚠️ If a Scheduled Break is added while Auto-breaks is enabled, 7shifts will only deduct break time/labor costs once.
SKIP AHEAD TO:
Setup Custom Breaks
Add a Schedule Break to a shift
View Scheduled Breaks
Print Scheduled Breaks
Frequently Asked Questions
Setup Custom Breaks
1. Log in to the web app as an Admin.
2. Hover over the navigation bar > select Settings > Company Settings:
3. Select the Labor & Compliance tab.
4. Head to the section Custom Breaks. Three commonly used breaks will be available by default: 30 minutes Unpaid Meal break, 10 minutes Paid Rest Break, and 15 minutes Paid Rest Break.
5. To add a custom break: click the + Create custom break button > enter in your break details (type, name, length) > hit Save.
6.To edit a custom break: click the pencil icon .
7.To delete a custom break: click on the ellipsis icon > select Delete.
8. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save!
When you're done setting up your custom breaks, these will appear as default options for your scheduling managers.
Add a Scheduled Break to a shift
1. Log in as an Admin or Manager/Assistant Manager with permissions.
2. Click on the Schedules tab.
3. Create a new shift or click on an existing shift.
4. Click + Add break:
5. Select a custom break from the drop-down, and set a start time (optional).
⚠️ If a break does not have a start time, it will not appear on the day view schedule
6. Click + Add break to add as many breaks as you'd like:
7. When you're ready, click Save!
View Scheduled Breaks
Scheduled breaks will be visible on...
The Schedules page > Day View. Hover over the shift to view the break type and duration!
- If the shift is edited to be reduced (by dragging the shift block), the Scheduled Break will automatically remove itself if it no longer falls within the shift's start/end times.
- If a Scheduled Break does not have a start time, it will not appear on the Day-view schedule.
Shift Trades from More > Shift Pool > Trade Requests. Breaks will be traded with the requested shift. You can click on Shift Details to view them:
⚠️ Adding, editing, and deleting Scheduled Breaks is only possible on the web app.
- Managers can view Schedules Breaks for the Employees with which they're assigned to the same Department
- Employees can view their other coworker's Scheduled Breaks.
Print Scheduled Breaks
1. Login to the web app > head to the Schedules tab.3. Click on the Tools icon
4. Checkmark Breaks:
5. Click Print.
FAQs
Q: Do Scheduled Breaks copy forward with Templates?
A: At this time, Scheduled Breaks do not copy forward when creating a schedule from a template.
Q: I'm integrated with a POS, and have enabled Schedule enforcement. Will the Scheduled Breaks surface on my POS?
A: At this time, Scheduled Breaks do not sync to an integrated POS.