We catch missed breaks, unpaid break premiums, and auto-deducted clinic lunches nobody took — then chase each one to a documented fix.
MicroForensics™ is built for independent clinics and medical groups, where a double-booked schedule means the MA works through lunch. A missed or short break is caught the pay period it happens and chased to a documented fix — and when a lawyer's letter demanding records arrives, your custodian of records, the person on your team authorized to produce them, answers it from one place. No app your MAs have to learn.
Free · 30 minutes · by phone or video. We tell you whether the records diagnostic, a fixed-fee review of your timecard, break and safety records, is worth doing for you, and what it costs. If it is not, we say so.
What MicroForensics is
MicroForensics reads the payroll and time clocks you already run, and Floburn operates the loop every pay period.
MicroForensics ingests your hourly timecard data, payroll, and related HR documents to flag missed breaks, unpaid break premiums, wage order errors, and open safety items, then chases each one to a documented fix. It is built to work with the existing payroll and timekeeping you already run, and Floburn runs it for you every pay period.
What it does
Five things, every pay period.
- Workers confirm and attest to the accuracy of their hours and breaks, among other labor compliance attestations, via existing tools you have in place that we configure or via custom interfaces we build for you. No one's pay ever depends on it.
- Written rules flag exceptions, such as a missed meal period, a missing rest break, or hours past a limit you set.
- Every flag is answered on the record. The correction is entered next to the original entry.
- When a worker misses breaks repeatedly, they and/or their managers get routed to training.
- Everything goes into one dated record that your designated custodian of records can export to answer a lawyer's letter demanding records from one place.
Two reasons a clinic's break record comes up short when a lawyer asks for it.
- 01
When patients run late, lunch is what gets cut.
Under Donohue v. AMN Services (Cal. 2021), time records showing missed, short, or late meal periods count against the employer unless rebutted. Clinic timekeeping commonly deducts 30 minutes whether or not the MA got the break, and the record is silent either way. A silent record gives you nothing to rebut with.
- 02
Ordinary claims, with the payroll to match.
Ambulatory healthcare is a recurring presence in California PAGA notice data — no citable table ranks the categories — and the claims that surface are ordinary: meal periods, wage statements, and a deduction nobody can document. Payroll of roughly $79.6k per employee (CBP 2023) reads, from the other side of the table, as ability to pay — exposure that has nothing to do with being a bad actor.
What we build on, and what we add.
- Practice management
The schedule stays where it is.
athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen — the appointment grid keeps running your day, and MicroForensics reads only the timekeeping and payroll side.
- Payroll & timekeeping
ADP, Paylocity, Gusto — unchanged.
MicroForensics reconciles your wage statements (§226) against the per-period attestation. That sign-off runs on a cadence of its own, decoupled from the payroll run, which stays yours.
- The sign-off
The record the deduction never made.
Every pay period, MAs, front office, phlebotomists, and techs sign off — in English or, where the crew needs it, Spanish — that breaks were taken and hours are right, ending the silence behind the blanket 30-minute deduction.
We build the connector for your stack — by API where one exists, by export, SFTP, or structured manual entry where one doesn’t — scoped and priced in the records diagnostic.
Most California employers owe a written workplace violence prevention plan, training, and a violent incident log kept five years, under Labor Code §6401.9; facilities covered by Cal/OSHA's health care standard (8 CCR 3342) owe their own instead. The records diagnostic confirms which one reaches you. Either way, the entry that never gets made is what was done about the incident.
One production package — the export that answers the letter. Hours, not weeks.
A lawyer’s letter demanding records usually arrives before any lawsuit does, and a §2699 PAGA notice after it. When the letter lands, the authorized custodian of records on your team — not Floburn — produces one production package in hours, not weeks. Payroll, timekeeping, HR, and safety are reconciled into one record every pay period, so production is an export from one place rather than a search across several.
- 01The export runs in under a minute.Retrieval from one record, not assembly across systems.
- 02Your custodian of records reviews and validates it.
- 03Your lawyer, an owner, or both review it, if you want them to.
- 04Your side sends it to the lawyer who asked.
The hours in “hours, not weeks” are steps 02 and 03: people you choose, reading it before it goes out. Floburn never reviews, validates, sends, or holds it.
The package exists before the letter does — the timeline is a property of how the record is kept, not a promise about your matter. No outcome is guaranteed; every matter turns on its facts.
What goes in the package, and how it is produced→Why it matters to a California employer
The window for the 15% PAGA cap closes when an employee or their lawyer asks for records, not when the lawsuit does.
The Private Attorneys General Act (Labor Code §2698 et seq.) lets an aggrieved employee — one who personally suffered each of the violations alleged (§2699(c)(1)) — sue for civil penalties on behalf of themselves and other current or former employees affected by the same violations. Penalties run per aggrieved employee, per pay period:
- $100 by default (§2699(f)(2)(A)). These penalties are separate from any wages and premiums owed.
Under the 2024 reform (AB 2288 and SB 92), Labor Code §2699(g) caps those civil penalties at 15 percent where the employer took all reasonable steps before the PAGA notice, or before a records request under §226, §432 or §1198.5, which usually comes first; §2699(h) caps them at 30 percent for remediation within 60 days after the PAGA notice. A court judges whether your steps were reasonable, looking at all the circumstances, including your size and resources. A court may also go above either cap if keeping to it would be unjust, arbitrary and oppressive, or confiscatory (§2699(e)(2)). No outcome is guaranteed; every matter turns on its facts.
The law rewards finding and fixing violations early, and being able to prove you did. The statute names four examples of reasonable steps (§2699(g)(2)):
- periodic payroll audits with action taken in response
- lawful written policies
- supervisor training on Labor Code and wage order compliance
- corrective action as to supervisors
MicroForensics keeps a dated, exportable record of all four. The audit, policy and training records speak to the cap. Worker sign-offs speak to whether breaks were taken.
How we work with you
A free call, a records diagnostic, and then only what you choose.
The call is free. The records diagnostic is a fixed fee, quoted on the call, and its report is yours whatever you decide next. Every paid step after it is written down in a document you sign before it starts.
- 01
Free 30-minute call, by phone or video
The screening pass: one question per exposure area, with you and whoever runs payroll. No records, nothing to prepare. If the records diagnostic is not worth doing for you, we say so.
- 02
Records diagnostic, a fixed fee, quoted on the call
A half- or full-day working session with your records open. Within fourteen calendar days of the working session, a written report: what your records show, item by item; a roadmap sorted into what you can fix yourself, what needs a process change and what needs a lawyer; and a practice records request answered from your own records. We walk you through it, directly or through your lawyer.
- 03
Implementation, only if you choose it, a separate agreement, signed and priced then
Two to four weeks to go-live, on the payroll and timekeeping you already run.
- 04
Ongoing service, every pay period
Floburn runs it: a weekly digest, a monthly report and a quarterly review. Billed monthly per active worker, on an annual term.
- 05
If you leave, at any time
Your record goes with you in a closing export, as structured files your lawyer or a successor vendor can use without us. It is yours throughout, and never held back over money.
Could you find these records today?
- Two weeks of time records exactly as the system exports them, unrounded if the system can do it
- One pay stub for someone who worked a normal week
- Whatever serves as the employee handbook, even if it is three years old
- The workplace violence prevention plan and its violent incident log, and the injury and illness prevention program, whatever state they are in
Anything you cannot find is itself a finding.
Clinic questions, answered.
01We auto-deduct 30 minutes for lunch — every clinic does. What's actually wrong with that?
A deduction isn't proof anyone took the break. The fix isn't necessarily abandoning the deduction; it's recording what actually happened — a per-pay-period sign-off with an exception path when the break didn't happen, the premium paid when one is owed, and a dated note of what changed in the schedule. The caps, and what a court decides, are set out above.
02Our staff signed meal-period waivers at hire. Doesn't that cover us?
Health-care waivers are real — Gerard v. Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center (Cal. 2018) upheld Wage Order 5's second-meal-period waiver for health-care employees. But a waiver signed at hire is policy: It says nothing about whether any particular break in any particular pay period was taken, owed, or knowingly skipped. What counts against the employer unless rebutted is a time record showing a missed, short, or late meal period. The waiver and the per-period attestation are different documents.
03We run athenahealth for the schedule and ADP for payroll. What does MicroForensics actually connect to?
The payroll and timekeeping side, not the practice-management system. We're direct about the engineering: Clinic stacks need custom connector work per client, and we scope and price that in the records diagnostic before you commit.
04Does SB 525's health-care minimum wage even apply to a practice our size?
It turns on the statute's covered-facility definitions, not headcount alone — licensed clinics, urgent care clinics, and physician groups of 25 or more physicians are among the covered types, each on its own phase-in schedule; the first step took effect October 16, 2024. Coverage is worth confirming for your specific facility. Either way, the wage floor only changes the price of a recorded miss — the record question is the same.
05We already have a lawyer’s letter or a PAGA notice. Can we still start?
Yes. Call your lawyer first: What the letter or notice means for you, and what to do about it, is for them to decide. Then book a free 30-minute call, and bring them if you like; tell us the date it arrived. With a matter open, your lawyer decides whether the records diagnostic runs through them or directly with Floburn, where its findings are discoverable. The sooner the record starts, the more pay periods it covers.
Free 30-minute call.
Tell us what you run and what prompted the call. The records diagnostic can run directly with Floburn or through your lawyer.
Free · 30 minutes · by phone or video. We tell you whether the records diagnostic, a fixed-fee review of your timecard, break and safety records, is worth doing for you, and what it costs. If it is not, we say so.
Floburn Inc. is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Counsel advises Floburn on system design and does not represent your company; retain your own counsel for advice specific to your situation.