This guide will discuss how to configure and manage automatic breaks in Tanda, including how automatic breaks work, creating break rule sets, viewing breaks on rosters and timesheets, and more.

By default, the automatic breaks feature is disabled. To enable the feature, navigate to Settings > Shift Breaks. Then, tick the setting 'Enable break rules.'

This will enable the break rules setting with our Default rule set created. Continue reading below for details on creating your own custom rule sets.

After enabling break rules, you can also choose to enable the following break rule settings, if desired:

As the name implies, Tanda's automatic breaks feature will automatically add compliant breaks to eligible rostered shifts.

While this feature is optional, it can simplify your rostering processes by:

Once configured, each automatic break rule considers:

Therefore, when a shift meets the minimum length required to be eligible for a break, breaks are automatically added to the shift upon creation.

If a break is set as unpaid, the break length will be deducted from the total rostered time. If a break is set as paid, the total rostered time remains unchanged.

Please be aware that automatic break rules and manual breaks are mutually exclusive. As such, creating a manual break on a roster will disable any automatic break rules that would have been applied and remove them from the shift. Deleting the manual break will re-trigger your automatic break rules. For example:

To begin creating automatic break rules, navigate to Settings > All Settings > Shift Breaks.

Then, either click + New to create a new rule set or edit an existing rule set.

When creating a new rule set, you'll need to enter the following details:

Ensure you click 'Create' to save your changes.

Once created, a summary of your break rule set will appear at the bottom of the page. This summary will be automatically updated to reflect any changes you make to the values.

Let's say that you have created a break rule set with the following criteria:

This would produce the following outcomes:

If you enable the 'Breaks on rosters have times' setting, you will then have the option to View/hide advanced break settings.

Under advanced break settings, you can configure your rules so that breaks must start at or before a certain number of hours have been worked.

By default, the break will commence at the latest possible point within these parameters. For example, a break set to start at or before five hours have elapsed will start on exactly the fifth hour.

You can also configure your rule so that breaks cannot start or finish in the first X hours of a shift.

This field can accept values from 0 to 2. When configured, no automatic breaks will be scheduled within the specified number of hours at the start or end of a shift.

For example, entering 1 in this field means a shift from 12pm-5pm will not have a break occur before 1pm or after 4pm.

You can view an audit history of your break rules at the bottom of the page. That way, you can easily see when any changes were made and by whom. For example:

Expand one of these menus to see a full audit history of each break rule.

If you enable any of the following Modern Award Templates, automatic break rules compliant with the Award will automatically be created and apply to staff under the Award.

Some templates that stipulate more specific break rules based on employment classification are also covered by these templates. The current list of covered templates and classifications is:

Accounts with these templates already enabled will not automatically have these breaks created.

These automatic rule sets can be removed by clicking the red Delete button in the bottom right corner of each rule set, or automatic break rules can be disabled altogether by clicking the check box near the top of the page.

Depending on how your break rule sets are configured, an employee may be covered by more than one applicable rule set.

Should this overlap occur, an orange warning will appear on the affected rule set, listing impacted employees and which rule set will apply instead.

If an employee qualifies for multiple rule sets as described above, you can prioritise which set should apply when rostering.

The Default break rule set will always take the lowest priority. Any newly created rule sets will be numbered, with Set 1 taking the highest priority. To change the priority of rule sets, click and drag the six dots on the rule set you'd like to move to reorder your rules. The set number will automatically update.

Any new rule sets will be given the lowest priority (excluding the default rule set) when first created.

When a rostered shift meets the requirements of an automatic break rule set, the relevant breaks will be assigned to the shift once both a start and end time have been entered.

To view which breaks apply to a shift, click on the shift card and refer to either the shift summary on the left of the roster or click the three dots (⋮) in the corner of a shift card and select Edit Breaks.

Break times will only appear on the Edit Breaks option if you have enabled the 'Breaks on rosters have times' setting. To do so, navigate to Settings > Shift Breaks and apply this setting.

To quickly check how many breaks apply to a shift, refer to the teacup icon next to the shift times. For instance, in the image below, two breaks apply.

A validation warning can only be triggered when breaks are manually added to a shift that would otherwise meet the requirements for an automatic break rule.

These warnings will highlight if:

Break information can be found on the right side of a Timesheet. For example:

This indicates the following:

Additionally, an unpaid break will appear grey on a timesheet's coloured bar, while a paid break will not be represented.

If you roster back-to-back shifts when staff are working in multiple teams for a day, automatic breaks will consider the total time the employee worked that day rather than applying breaks to each individual shift.

For shifts to be considered back-to-back, the gap between them must be less than or equal to 60 minutes. Any gaps up to 60 minutes will be recognised as unpaid breaks. Therefore, the rule set will skip assigning auto unpaid breaks if the gap is long enough to accommodate the break.

For example, shifts 4 hours or longer require a 30-minute unpaid break. If a gap between back-to-back shifts is only 15 minutes, the unpaid break will apply elsewhere in the shift.

On the mobile app, employees can see the total break time for each shift that has breaks assigned.

To see automatic break start and finish times on the app, you must enable the 'Breaks on rosters have times' setting, as described above.