Fair Workweek compliance, on autopilot.
For every multi-location operator covered by NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Oregon Fair Workweek law.
A plug-in compliance layer that documents every shift change, calculates every premium dollar, captures every employee consent, and ships the DCWP audit packet in one click. Works on top of your existing stack — NEXOS scheduling, Kronos, Workday, 7shifts — no rip-and-replace.
$50 per active location per month, $0 to integrate. A 200-store chain pays $120K a year for a layer that earns its keep the first audit it survives.
The compliance landscape changed
NYC Fair Workweek enforcement is entering a new phase. Random audits. Secret shoppers. Eight-figure settlements. Operators who aren't documenting every shift change are gambling against a heavily-resourced enforcement agency.
$38.9M
Starbucks settlement — May 2026
Paid out to ~23,000 NYC workers for Fair Workweek violations. Same class of violations every fast-food chain in the city is exposed to.
$15,000
Per pattern-and-practice violation
Court-ordered penalty under DCWP's pattern-and-practice authority. Single store across multiple weeks of bad scheduling = compounding exposure fast.
$80M+
Citywide worker relief to date
Delivered through DCWP enforcement actions since the law took effect. The new administration is signaling much more aggressive enforcement ahead.
The daily reality
What operators deal with today, without us
Compliance work falls on people who should be running stores. Here's where the hours go — and the risk piles up.
Regional managers spend 4-6 hours every week
Manually pulling shift schedules across stores, checking for last-minute changes, then assembling rollups for the CFO. Hours that should be running operations.
Premium pay math happens in spreadsheets
Calculated days late, often wrong. Operators pay too much (afraid of underpaying) or too little (employee complains → DCWP audit). Either way, a problem.
Multi-store employees get double-tracked
An employee working 4 stores shows up as 4 separate records. FLSA overtime gets missed. Fair Workweek 14-day notice resets at each store. Real exposure.
DCWP shows up, you have 30 days
To produce 3 years of schedules, change history, consent records, and premium pay logs. Most operators panic, hire an external auditor for $20K-$50K, and still get findings.
Schedule changes happen without consent
Manager moves a shift two days out, doesn't remember to text the employee. That single un-consented change is a documented violation if DCWP looks.
Just-cause termination paperwork lives in someone's email
When DCWP asks why an employee was terminated or had hours cut, the documentation chain has to be reconstructed from Slack threads and HR notes. Sometimes it can't be.
Every one of these is automated by the compliance module. The next section shows you the law these pain points exist to cover.
What NYC Fair Workweek actually requires
The fast-food tier — limited-service restaurant chains with 30+ NYC locations — carries the strictest requirements. Every one of these is a documented audit trigger.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| 14-day advance schedule notice | Workers receive schedules at least 14 days before the week starts. Late changes require premium pay. |
| Premium pay on schedule changes | $10 to $75 per shift, depending on type (added, cancelled, hours added, hours removed, time shifted). |
| Clopening rule | Close + open shifts within 11 hours require written employee consent + a $100 premium per shift. |
| Just-cause termination | Cannot fire, lay off, or cut hours >15% without documented cause or legitimate economic reason. |
| Right to refuse late shifts | Workers may decline shifts added within 14 days without retaliation. |
| Right to claim open shifts | Existing employees get first crack at open shifts before new hires are brought on. |
| Good-faith hours estimate at hire | New employees receive a written estimate of median weekly hours. |
| Schedule change consent | Late schedule changes require written employee consent before becoming binding. |
| 3-year record retention | All scheduling records, change history, and consents must be retained for 3 years, electronically. |
Source: NYC Admin Code Subchapter F (Fair Workweek). The retail-tier rules are similar but lighter (72-hour notice, no premium pay requirement, no clopening rule).
Works with what you already run
No rip-and-replace. Just compliance.
Fair Workweek compliance is a layer, not a platform replacement. Keep scheduling in whatever your team uses today — NEXOS, Kronos, Workday, 7shifts. Keep payroll in ADP, Paychex, or Gusto. We pull shift data + change history + termination decisions on a schedule you control, run detection, and write the records DCWP wants to see.
Path 1
Schedule inside NEXOS
Use NEXOS Sam to draft schedules from your POS sales + labor budget, then publish through NEXOS. Compliance auto-fires on every edit — no integration work. The pre-publish check, the SMS consent flow, the audit packet, Iris's review — all native, zero setup, zero ongoing maintenance.
Best fit: chains starting fresh or replacing a clunky scheduling tool.
Path 2
Keep your scheduler, add compliance
Already running Kronos / UKG, Workday, 7shifts, Deputy, When I Work, or ADP Schedule? Compliance pulls shifts + edits + terminations via the integration of your choice — API, webhook, scheduled CSV drop, or SFTP. Same detection engine, same Iris review, same audit packet. Your team keeps the tools they know.
Best fit: chains with established scheduling stacks that just need the compliance layer.
Confirmed integration paths — zero rip-and-replace required
NEXOS Scheduling
Native
Kronos / UKG
API + SFTP
Workday
API + webhook
7shifts
API
Deputy
API
When I Work
API + CSV
ADP Workforce Now
API + CSV
Paychex Flex
API + CSV
Gusto
API
Toast Payroll
API
Square Payroll
API
Clover
API
Don't see your system? We'll build the integration as part of the pilot — no charge.
What it looks like in practice
The three surfaces your team uses
Compliance dashboard for owners and ops leadership. Pre-publish check for managers building schedules. Weekly Monday digest that lands in the owner's inbox before the team gets going.
Surface 1 · Compliance dashboard
Fair Workweek Compliance
Last 30 days · clopenings, premium pay, and schedule-change audit trail
Premium-eligible changes
39
Premiums owed
31
Owed amount
$1,247.00
Iris's review
Last 30 days saw $1,247 in premium pay across 31 events, concentrated at Store 4 (8 events, $620) and Store 7 (5 events, $410). One waiver pattern worth investigating: 4 premiums waived under "employee_requested" by the same manager at Store 4.
Move Store 4 publish day from Thursday to Monday. 8 of 8 late changes there happened within 72h of shift start — earlier publish window cuts exposure by ~60%.
Review the 4-waiver pattern at Store 4. Same manager, same category — would warrant a closer look in an audit.
Last 8 weeks
Top stores by premium
Compliance dashboard rendered with example data — exact numbers from your own scheduling.
Surface 2 · Pre-publish compliance check
Fair Workweek pre-publish check
Jurisdiction · New York City
NYC Admin Code Subchapter F (§§ 20-1221–20-1244)
Short-notice
4
Clopening pairs
2
Est. premium $
$260
🔐 Iris's review
Publishing this schedule as-is would owe $260 in premium pay on day one — 2 clopening pairs ($200) and 4 short-notice shifts ($60). All concentrated on Thursday-Friday at the Store 4 store.
→ Swap Thursday's 21:00 close with Friday's 08:00 open — kills both clopening pairs. Saves $200 immediately.
| Sam Rivera | Thu 21:00 → Fri 08:00 | 9h rest |
| Bria Patel | Sat 23:00 → Sun 09:00 | 10h rest |
Manager sees the cost of late changes before clicking Publish.
Surface 3 · Monday weekly drift digest
From: Iris · NEXOS Compliance <compliance@nexosscan.com>
To: ops@example.com
Subject: Fair Workweek — last week: $1,247 owed
🔐 Iris · Fair Workweek weekly drift
Last week — sample digest
Hi Maria,
Last week saw $1,247 in premium pay across 31 events, up from $612 the prior week. Concentrated at Store 4 (8 events, $620) and Store 7 (5 events, $410). One audit-defensibility concern: 4 premiums waived under "employee_requested" by the same manager at Store 4.
Premium owed
$1,247
Premium events
31
Iris's recommendations
- Move Store 4 publish day from Thursday to Monday — cuts exposure ~60%.
- Review the 4-waiver pattern at Store 4 — same manager, same category.
- Sam Rivera scheduled 47h across 3 stores last week — confirm FLSA OT paid.
Numbers sourced directly from your scheduling data. Iris cites the rows, never invents.
Email lands every Monday at 7am EST. Owners see the week before the team starts.
How we solve it
Compliance happens in the background
Your managers schedule. NEXOS documents every change, calculates every premium, captures every consent, and exports the audit packet on demand. No new workflow. No checklist for your team to maintain. Compliance moves from a quarterly fire drill to invisible.
14-day advance-notice scanner
Every shift edit checks the gap between change time and shift date. Within 14 days? Auto-flagged as premium-pay-eligible per NYC fee schedule. Manager sees the cost before they hit save.
Clopening auto-detector
Scans every published schedule for close-then-open shift pairs under 11 hours, across all stores an employee works at. Flags before publish. Requires written consent. Auto-calculates the $100 premium per shift.
Premium pay categorizer
Every change type — shift added, cancelled, hours added, hours removed, time shifted, location moved — mapped to the NYC fee schedule and queued for payroll. No spreadsheet math.
Cross-store employee unification
Same person working multiple locations is one record across all of them. Hours roll up to one total for FLSA, NYC daily overtime, and Fair Workweek 14-day notice + premium calculations. No silos.
Schedule change consent workflow
Late changes send the employee an in-app + SMS consent request. Captured with timestamp, IP, and device fingerprint. Manager can't finalize the change without it.
Just-cause documentation
Terminating an employee or cutting hours by more than 15% requires picking a documented reason from a categorized list, with optional notes. Stored permanently. Audit-ready.
Good-faith hours estimate at hire
New-employee onboarding requires a median weekly hours estimate. Deviations from the estimate trigger audit flags for HR review.
One-click DCWP compliance export
Excel and PDF export with every shift, every change, every consent, every premium calc, every termination reason, for any date range up to 3 years. The exact pack DCWP asks for in audits.
Owner compliance dashboard
Live red / yellow / green per store. Unresolved consents, unpaid premiums, undocumented terminations, drift warnings — all in one view.
Iris 🔐 — proactive compliance automation
Pre-publish scan flags violations BEFORE the schedule goes live. Weekly drift alerts when scheduling patterns trend non-compliant. Auto-updates when NYC amends the law.
Meet Iris 🔐 — compliance automation
Built like an auditor, not a chatbot
Most compliance "AI" is a chatbot guessing at the law. Iris is the opposite — a fully built compliance specialist with the current NYC, SF, Chicago, Philly, and Oregon Fair Workweek rule packs already loaded, kept up to date as cities amend the law. She makes real decisions that protect your business — blocking unsafe edits before publish, flagging audit-defensibility risk before it becomes a finding, refusing to authorize a waiver that doesn't match a real safe harbor. Every operational decision is keyed to a row in your data. Every premium dollar is sourced from the city's published fee schedule, never invented. She cites the exact section that triggered each flag, every time.
She never invents a premium amount
Every dollar figure she cites comes from the city's published fee schedule — NYC § 20-1222(c), SF Retail Workers Bill of Rights, Chicago Mun. Code § 1-25, etc. If a number isn't in the data, she doesn't write one. Auditors can trace any claim back to source.
She knows which city governs each store
Each location has its own rule pack — 14-day notice for NYC, 11-hour clopening for NYC, 10-hour for Chicago and Oregon, 9-hour for Philadelphia, no clopening premium in SF (state covers it separately). A chain across cities gets the right calculation per store.
She refuses to interpret the law creatively
If she's not sure whether a rule applies, she flags it for human review and cites the specific section in question. She does not make legal calls. She does not predict audit outcomes. She surfaces patterns and the operator decides.
Every claim is keyed to a row
When she says "Store 412 is your biggest exposure," the next sentence cites the store name, the premium count, the dollar total — all pulled from the same audit tables the DCWP investigator would see. The chain from claim to source data is unbroken.
The deterministic audit numbers come from pure SQL aggregation against your scheduling tables. Iris adds the narrative on top — never the math. The two-layer design is why the same packet survives both a sales demo and a DCWP investigator.
The money math
What the compliance layer pays back, every month
A 200-store chain spends $10K/month on the module. Here's where that recovers — line by line.
Regional manager hours
Stops the 4-6 weekly hours each RM burns pulling schedules + manually checking notice windows. At $90K fully-loaded RM cost, 5h × 8 RMs × $43/hr = $1,720/wk = $7,400/mo recovered.
Over-payment of premiums
Operators paying out of an abundance of caution typically overpay 15-25% on premium pay. Even at 200 stores with modest exposure ($800/store/mo of premium), 20% over-payment = $32K/mo previously wasted.
Avoided external auditor
Pre-audit prep packs done by labor-and-employment firms run $20K-$50K per cycle. The one-click DCWP audit pack replaces that engagement. Even one $30K audit prep avoided pays the module for 3 months.
FLSA overtime caught at source
Cross-store employee unification catches the FLSA overtime that single-store payroll silently misses. For chains with 30%+ multi-store workers, this alone is typically $4-8K/mo in legitimate (and now defensible) OT savings.
Cross-store hours capped accurately
When an employee's combined hours approach the city OT trigger, NEXOS flags it pre-publish — managers can swap shifts before the trigger fires. Avoiding a single 4-hour OT spike per store per month = $1,200-$2,400/mo at scale.
One $15K pattern-and-practice violation
DCWP pattern-and-practice penalties run $15,000+ per documented pattern. Avoiding even one a year — which the module is designed for — pays for the module across 25 stores for a full year.
Net 200-store math
~$45,000/month recovered
vs $10,000/mo module cost. 4.5x net before counting a single avoided violation.
How it works · Already running in your account
Four layers of compliance, working together
Detection runs the moment a schedule is touched. Documentation captures consent and reasoning at the source. Reports drop a DCWP audit packet on demand. Iris watches for drift and surfaces what needs attention before the week starts.
Detection Engine
- Clopening auto-detector across all stores per employee
- 14-day advance-notice scanner with auto-flag
- Premium pay categorizer (NYC Subchapter F mapping)
- Cross-store employee deduplication + unified hours rollup
Documentation Workflow
- Schedule change consent flow (SMS + in-app) with full audit metadata
- Just-cause termination + hour-reduction documentation requirement
- Good-faith hours estimate at hire (onboarding step)
- Schedule builder UI gating for late changes — manager sees cost before save
Audit-Ready Reports
- One-click DCWP compliance export (Excel + PDF, up to 3-year range)
- Owner compliance dashboard — live red / yellow / green per store
- Cross-store employee hours rollup with FLSA + NYC OT calc
- Pre-audit prep pack — single-click 3-year ZIP with signed manifest
Iris Automation — Proactive Compliance
- Pre-publish violation scan — flags issues before the schedule goes live
- Weekly compliance drift alerts to GM + Owner
- Auto-update for NYC law amendments without code redeploy
- Proactive notifications through the existing notification bell + mobile push
The unique-to-us moat
Cross-store employee intelligence
Most scheduling platforms — R365, MarginEdge, the competition — treat each store as a silo. They track an employee's hours per store. They fail Fair Workweek the moment an employee covers a shift at a sister store.
NEXOS unifies the employee record across every store in the corporation. Hours aggregate for FLSA overtime, NYC daily overtime, and Fair Workweek 14-day notice + premium pay calculations. One employee, one source of truth, every store rolls up.
This is the difference between "technically compliant" and actually defensible in a DCWP audit.
Pricing
$50 per location per month
Premium add-on on top of any base tier. Charged per active location. ROI math is simple: one $15,000 pattern-and-practice violation avoided pays for the module across 25 stores for a full year.
10 locations
$500/mo
$6K/year
50 locations
$2,500/mo
$30K/year
200 locations
$10,000/mo
$120K/year
Bundled at no upcharge for design-partner customers committing at Enterprise tier.
Common questions
What CTOs and ops leaders ask first
Straight answers, no hedge.
Do we have to switch schedulers to use this?+
No. The compliance module is a plug-in layer. If you already run Kronos, Workday, 7shifts, Deputy, When I Work, ADP Schedule, or any equivalent — keep it. We pull shifts, schedule changes, and termination decisions from your existing system via API, webhook, scheduled CSV drop, or SFTP. The detection engine and audit pack run on top. Path 2 in the integrations table above.
How is Iris different from a generic AI compliance chatbot?+
Iris doesn't guess at the law and she doesn't invent numbers. Every premium dollar comes from the city's published fee schedule, every claim she makes is keyed to a row in your data, and she cites the exact NYC Admin Code or city ordinance section that triggered each flag. The deterministic numbers come from pure SQL aggregation against your scheduling tables — Iris adds the narrative on top, never the math. That's why the same audit pack survives both a sales demo and an actual DCWP investigation.
What happens when NYC amends the law?+
Rule packs are config, not code. When a city amends its fee schedule, notice window, or clopening definition, we update the rule pack centrally — every store in that city picks up the new rules without a redeploy or contract amendment. The Mamdani administration is signaling more amendments; the architecture is designed for it.
Does this work outside NYC?+
Yes. Live today in New York City, San Francisco (Retail Workers Bill of Rights), Chicago (Fair Workweek Ordinance), Philadelphia (Fair Workweek Standards), and Oregon (statewide ORS 653.412+). Each store is assigned its own city rule pack at the data layer. Chains operating across cities — like a NYC chain with stores in Chicago or Philly — get the right premium calculation per location automatically.
How long does integration with our existing scheduler take?+
Four weeks from signed pilot to live across all stores. Path 1 (schedule in NEXOS) is faster — usually 2 weeks. Path 2 (integrate with existing scheduler) lands closer to 4 weeks depending on the source system's API maturity. Kronos and 7shifts have well-known APIs; we've shipped both. Workday and ADP are slightly heavier but well-documented. Don't see your system? We build the integration as part of the pilot — no charge.
What if Iris makes a wrong recommendation?+
Iris doesn't make legal calls or authorize actions. She surfaces patterns and recommendations sourced from your actual data; the manager decides. She refuses to interpret the law creatively — if a rule's applicability is unclear, she flags for human review and cites the specific section in question. Premium amounts come from the deterministic fee schedule, never invented. The worst-case mistake is a non-actionable recommendation, not an incorrect payment or a missed violation.
How does this handle an employee working across multiple stores?+
This is the unique-to-us moat. Most workforce-management tools — R365, MarginEdge, the incumbents — treat each store as a silo. They miss FLSA overtime the moment an employee covers a shift at a sister store. NEXOS unifies the employee record across every store in the corporation. Hours aggregate to one total for FLSA OT, city-specific daily OT, and Fair Workweek 14-day notice + premium calculations. One employee, one source of truth, every store rolls up.
Can we self-host this?+
Not today — multi-tenant SaaS with per-tenant schema isolation. For enterprise customers requiring a dedicated tenant in a separate cloud account, we can have a commercial conversation at significantly different terms. Most chains find the shared multi-tenant model with strict isolation meets their security posture without the operational overhead of self-hosting.
What does it cost?+
$50 per active location per month. No integration fee. Bundled at no upcharge for named launch customers at Enterprise tier. ROI math: a 200-store chain spends $10K/month and typically recovers $40-50K/month across saved regional-manager hours, caught premium over-payments, avoided external auditor engagements, and surfaced FLSA overtime. One avoided $15K pattern-and-practice violation pays for the module across 25 stores for a full year.
Survive your next audit.
Stop running reports manually.
$50 per active location per month. Works whether you schedule in NEXOS or keep Kronos / Workday / 7shifts. The first named launch customers in each city get a direct line to product and case-study positioning — bundled at no upcharge at Enterprise tier.
Live today across New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Oregon — every covered jurisdiction running on the same compliance engine, one rule pack per store.