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Maggie Sheerin is a law clerk in the firm's San Francisco office.

Rounding is the practice of capturing time entries on a time clock and converting them to the closest five, ten, or fifteen minute equivalent. For example, both entries at 8:58 and 9:04 may be converted to 9:00 a.m. A recent California Court of Appeal decision, Camp v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., calls into question the continued viability of time-rounding policies in California. In 2012, the Court of Appeal held in See’s Candy Shops, Inc. v. Superior Court, 210 Cal. App. 4th 889 (2012), that an employer’s time rounding policy is lawful under California law when the policy is “fair and neutral on its face” and is used in a way that will not result, over a period of time, “in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked.” As generally applied, the See’s Candy test permitted time clock rounding systems so long as the rounding was to the nearest set increment as opposed to always rounding against the employee. Multiple appellate decisions after See’s Candy cited it favorably in granting summary judgment to the employer.Continue Reading California Court of Appeal Limits the Permissibility of Time Rounding