We catch missed breaks, unpaid break premiums, and unpaid rest-and-recovery time on flag-hour techs — then chase each one to a documented fix.
MicroForensics™ is built for California dealership service departments and independent repair shops, where the job clock tracks billed efficiency, not meal breaks. 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 new software for the techs or the service lane.
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.
Three reasons a flag-time shop's break record comes up short when a lawyer asks for it.
- 01
The job clock is not a time clock.
Under Donohue v. AMN Services (Cal. 2021), time records showing missed, short, or late meal periods raise a rebuttable presumption of violation. A DMS or shop-management job clock has no reason to capture a meal punch. A record that is simply silent has nothing to rebut it with.
- 02
Flag-hour pay is piece-rate law.
Gonzalez v. Downtown L.A. Motors (Cal. Ct. App. 2013) is the dealership-technician case behind Labor Code §226.2: California treats flag-hour pay as piece-rate work, with rest and recovery periods and non-productive time paid separately. The statute this industry's own litigation produced now governs flat-rate pay statewide — and it is enforced through records, not intentions.
- 03
A court upheld an hourly-plus-flag pay plan that paid every clocked hour.
Mora v. C.E. Enterprises (Cal. Ct. App. 2025) upheld a dealership's hourly-plus-flag pay plan; the holding turned on the plan paying every clocked hour. The shop showed that with its record of clocked hours and breaks — a record California required it to keep anyway.
What we build on, and what we add.
- Shop management
Job clocks & repair orders
Tekmetric, Shopmonkey, or Shop-Ware in an independent shop; the CDK or Reynolds & Reynolds DMS in a dealership. MicroForensics reads the clocked hours and repair-order segments your system already produces and changes nothing in it.
- Payroll
Wage statements & flag pay
Gusto, QuickBooks Payroll, Paylocity, or ADP — whichever runs the pay plan. MicroForensics reconciles the §226 wage statement against the attestation record. The attestation runs on a cadence of its own, decoupled from the payroll run, which stays yours.
- The record
Per-pay-period sign-off
Every pay period, each tech, advisor, porter, and detailer confirms breaks and hours, in English or, where the crew needs it, Spanish.
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.
§226.2 is the second set of records specific to flag-time shops. The same attestation carries that record: Each flag-hour tech's sign-off confirms the rest periods behind the §226.2 pay actually happened.
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 written heat illness plan and the injury and illness prevention program, whatever state they are in
Anything you cannot find is itself a finding.
Auto service questions, answered.
01We pay our techs on flag hours. Is the pay plan itself the exposure?
Not by itself, if the plan pays what §226.2 requires. The exposure in a flag-time shop is the record that isn't there. MicroForensics builds the clocked-hours and attestation record on the pay plan you already run — it doesn't ask you to change the plan.
02Our DMS (or Tekmetric) already clocks every job. What does MicroForensics add?
It adds three things beside the job clock: the clocked-hours-and-breaks record California requires you to keep, the technician's own contemporaneous sign-off on it, and the entry showing what was paid or fixed when a break went missing. Your shop-management system stays exactly as it is.
03Does this cover porters, detailers, and lube techs, or just the flag-hour techs?
The whole hourly roster. Flag-hour techs carry the §226.2 piece-rate rules, but the meal-and-rest record matters for every W-2 hourly employee. Everyone signs the same per-pay-period record, on a phone or on paper; both flow into the same audit trail.
04We're one store in a dealer group. Are we the right size for this?
A NADA-average store runs about 65 employees, squarely the small-to-mid-sized W-2 employer MicroForensics is built for. But size is counted at the actual W-2 employer, and a store inside a multi-store group may not be its own employer, depending on how the group documents employment. We settle that first on the free 30-minute call; if the group is the employer, we'll say so and take the conversation to the group level.
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.