We are happy to announce enhancements to the meal break options in Arcoro Time. Two enhancements to the Meal Break Policy are shipping together in this release:

• Cost Code Exclusions for Missing Meal Break — administrators can now exclude designated non-work cost codes (Holiday, PTO, Training, etc.) from triggering the Missing Meal Break indicator.
  • Admins entering Holiday or other administrative time through non-work cost codes were triggering false meal break errors. Because the Missing Meal Break indicator is treated as a time error, it blocked employee timecard approvals and required unnecessary admin intervention to resolve.
• First-Punch Meal Break Window — a new configurable compliance rule that flags a meal break exception if a break is not taken within a set number of hours from the employee's first punch of the day.
  • Arcoro Time's existing meal break detection only checked whether a break was recorded, not when. A break recorded late in a shift passed the old check but could still violate meal break timing requirements customers are subject to. Customers had no way to configure a compliance threshold tied to hours worked from shift start, leaving them exposed to undetected violations.

Enhancements

Cost Code Exclusions

• New setting on the Exclude Cost Codes policy section: "Include selected cost codes to be excluded when considering Manual Meal Break exceptions."
• When a timecard contains any entry on an excluded cost code, hours worked on that cost code are not counted toward meal break exception logic.
• Configurable per policy, so multi-policy customers can set exclusions independently.
• Only affects Manual Meal Break mode; automatic break deduction is unaffected.
• Read-only until the parent Exclude Cost Codes policy is enabled; the setting retains its saved value even when greyed out, so re-enabling the parent restores it.
• Applies to both the delayed and missing/duration meal break rules.

First Punch Window

• Anchor point: the employee's earliest In punch of the calendar day, evaluated per employee per day. On shared kiosk devices, each employee's own first punch is used, independent of other employees on the same device.
• Threshold: configurable via an H:MM selector, default 5 hours (fractional values like 5:30 supported), max 24 hours.
• If a meal break is recorded before the threshold elapses, no violation. If the threshold elapses with no break recorded, the system flags: "Delayed Meal Break Start."
• This rule is additive to and independent from the cost code exclusion setting above; both can be active at once.

Where Exceptions Appear

• Timecard Exceptions report
• Employee-facing timecard approval screen
• Time Summary and Daily Summary, as an orange informational badge count (separate from red blocking exceptions — meal break exceptions do not gate approval)
• Meal Break Exception Report