Meal & Break Compliance Checker: Catch Missed Breaks Before They Become Penalties

The problem this kills

In California-style break states, a missed meal break isn't a footnote — it's a premium-pay penalty, usually a full hour at the employee's regular rate, owed every time a break is missed, taken late, or cut short. Multiply that across a restaurant, a retail floor, or a warehouse running hundreds of shifts a week and the exposure is real money, plus a class-action target if it goes unpaid.

The trouble is that nobody can eyeball it. The rules are fiddly — a 30-minute meal before the end of the 5th hour, a second meal on long shifts, a paid 10-minute rest per four hours — and the answer lives buried in raw punch data nobody reads line by line. Some "violations" are actually legitimate: the employee signed a meal waiver, or voluntarily skipped a break. Auto-penalizing those is just as wrong as missing a real one.

So most teams either ignore it until a complaint lands, or burn hours every pay period squinting at timecards. You don't need to live like that, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.

What you'll build

A private web tool for your payroll and compliance team. You import a pay period's punch data (CSV or Google Sheet), and the tool checks every shift against the break rules you configured — by state and role. It produces a clean violation list: who, which shift, what rule was broken (missed / late / short meal, missed rest break, missed second meal), and the premium pay owed, computed at the regular rate you specify.

Then the important part: a manager or compliance reviewer works the list. They can confirm a real violation, or waive one that's covered by a signed meal waiver or a voluntary skip. Only approved premium lines flow to the final export — a payroll-ready CSV in the exact columns your payroll system expects. Every decision is logged: who reviewed it, when, and why.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business — it does not assume a generic template. It asks how you capture punches today, what systems you run, the exact field names and codes in your data, your states and roles, your specific break rules and waiver policies, your typical and peak shift volumes, and your messiest edge cases (split shifts, on-call, voluntary skips). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you, you give it a thumbs-up, and only then does it build a tool shaped to how you actually work.

From there it walks you step by step through the data model, the punch import, the break-rule engine, the premium-pay computation, the reviewer approval screen, and the payroll export — each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt. It also gives you a no-integration fallback so you can build the whole thing today, running entirely off a punch CSV.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own punch and pay data.
• A complete audit trail — who reviewed each violation, when, and whether it was confirmed or waived, with the reason.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts the violation list and premiums, a person reviews and approves, and only then does anything land in the payroll export. Waivers and voluntary skips are flagged, never auto-penalized.
• Duplicate guards so the same violation (employee + shift date + violation type) can't be processed or paid twice.

Who it's for

Payroll and compliance leads in California-style break states — restaurants, retail, and warehousing — where missed-break penalties add up fast and a clean, auditable premium-pay process is worth its weight in avoided liability.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.