Release Summary
In this update, Buddy embraces change by redesigning the People and Setting menus. Users will now be able to view employee payslips, timesheets and leave directly from a person's profile, including a drill-down on tax calculations. The pension feature has been updated massively, including new enrolment settings, letter templates, and re-assessment notifications.
To keep our users secure, an Account Lockout feature has been implemented to prevent brute-password attempts.
- New Security Feature: Account Lockout
- Redesigned User Interface for People and Settings
- Technical overhaul to Workforce Integration
- Additional customisations and options
- More Quality of Life updates
For the full set of release notes, please read below:
Release Notes
New Security Measures
When it comes to cloud-software, security has to be implemented at numerous levels. In this update, we've introduced account lockouts as a security feature to prevent forced attempts as password guessing.
After numerous incorrect guesses, accounts will be locked out briefly. The duration will exponentially increase for each additional failed attempt. Users can unlock accounts via email verification.
-
New: If an account has 5 incorrect password attempts, the account will be locked out. After each consequent failed attempt, the lockout period will continuously increase in length.
This applies for all accounts, including employee accounts. - New: Fret not! Locked accounts can be unlocked through email verification.
- New: When a password is reset, any active sessions will be automatically logged out
- Update: A login session will lose its authentication after 30 minutes of inactivity, requiring another login
Pensions
Are you afraid you'll miss an employee's enrolment in a pension group? This update introduced auto-enrolment, re-assessment periods, and new lists for viewing employee pension data in one place.
In addition, you'll be able to customise templates for enrolment and postponement letters. Note: Whilst the letters are being generated, they cannot yet be downloadable or sent until an update releasing shortly.
- New: Added an Employee list and Pension status within the pension page to quickly review enrolment and integration links.
-
New: Enrolment & Postponement Letters
- Introducing a Letter section within the Pensions menu
- Users can customise letter templates or use default versions
- You'll be able to look at the Template History to see changes
- Letters will be downloadable and can be sent in upcoming updates
-
New: Auto-Enrolment Pension Settings
- You can now store auto-enrolment and last reassessment dates in the new pension settings.
- Select a Default Pension Group to be used for auto-enrolment
- Select rules to auto-postpone (by 3 months) for no, all or variable-hour employees.
- Options to auto-enrol employees and automatically send auto-enrolment letters will be introduced shortly.
-
New: Enrolment Protection
- A new banner will show to highlight re-assessment periods with an option to re-assess pensions at any time
- Payroll will be blocked if re-enrolment has expired by 3 months.
- New: Added option for Pension Schemes to be non-qualifying for auto-enrolment, which allows for optional schemes to be set below the auto-enrolment threshold.
- Update: Resolved UI issues with settings Custom Contributions
People
In the employee profile, you can now see payslips and directly add timesheets and leave applications!
This is part of a redesign of the People page, which has moved the different pages (tax, salary, etc.) from upper tabs into a sidebar.
Note that this has changed the order of some pages. We hope that after a short adjustment period, you'll love the new layout!
- New: The People page has received a User Interface redesign
- New: Audit logs page can now be filtered by action and type of change.
- Update: Marital details are no longer required when setting an employee as married
- Fix: Resolved an issue where some payslip audit logs did not load
- Update: Since the net salary option is not yet available, this option is no longer selectable as a Salary Type.
- Fix: Directors will no longer show as undefined in the Run Payroll UI. Job type filters across Buddy (such as Leave) have also been updated to include the Director type.
- New: Adding a starter declaration for tax purposes for new employees
Payroll Changes
Oops, it looks like a few of you encountered issues where no totals to date were considered invalid rather than intentionally omitted. We've updated a few quirks to improve the user experience.
- Fix: Resolved an issue with incorrect pay-period numbering for the January 2025 payroll if the monthly period spanned from December.
- Fix: Payslips no longer provide an error if some sections of Totals to Date are blank. Blank values will now be considered as 0.
- Update: Added additional validation to prevent the creation of invalid pay-dates which were not auto-corrected on Safari
-
Accupay™:
- Update: The Process Timesheets feature will now instead show the balance, including future-dated leave, to avoid scenarios where pre-booked leave is given as paid leave for under hours.
- Fix: Resolved an edge-case where not all set rules were followed when processing under hours as leave on a Sunday that was also a Public Holiday.
Payroll History
- New: In Payroll History, we've added a new icon to show that payslips have been sent. This will only trigger for future sends and will not be added retroactively.
- New: In the Payslip list page, each tax detail is now clickable to display the calculation breakdown.
Tax Forms
Tax Forms are a crucial part of payroll and FPS submissions should be straightforward for any agent. We've improved on removing special characters, displaying errors for failed submissions, and added the option to submit a late reason.
- Fix: Fixed incorrect values in P30 and P32 relating to "Amount due to HMRC". Note: to update previous P30s/P32s, one has to refresh payroll reports from the Payroll History.
- New: FPS submission errors can now be seen directly through Buddy by clicking on the Failed Submission (in Payroll History).
- Update: To reduce the risk of submission errors, FPS submissions will now remove or change special characters from fields.
- New: A late reason can now be selected when submitting FPS late
Reports
The .pdf payroll report will now include pension contributions, as well as a fix to correctly show the base hours.
- Fix: Corrected the Payroll Report (.pdf) to show the correct base hours when an employee has Holiday Leave in payslip
- Update: The Payroll Report (.pdf) now includes Pension Contributions.
Advisors (Bureaus)
One of the challenges of bureaus is that it is increasingly difficult to maintain an overview of all clients on one page. Our team is working on solving these challenges, and in this update, we are introducing new views for Tax Forms (including EPS submissions) and pension enrolment dates.
- New: Introduced a Tax Form List to show P30s, P32s and other tax forms to be able to manage all EPS submissions and tax reports within a single page
- New: In addition to the pension changes, advisors can enable Enrolment view in their Client List to keep track of enrolment and assessment dates.
- Fix: Scheduled Tasks filter has been corrected from "Completed" to "Success" to properly match the items.
Settings
Similar to the employee profiles, the settings menu has now shifted into a sidebar. In addition, many settings are now treated in their page, such as overtime rates. This reduces the need to save all settings when changing a single subsection.
-
Update: Redesigned the user interface, moving menus into the sidebar
- Several pages are now separated on their own
- New: In Settings, users can now set the Default Landing page for employee portal.
- New: Employer NI Allowance is now an exposed field; note that this cannot be edited.
- Update: The company details form when adding new company's have been updated to match the exact fields used in the company settings.
- New: Added a new section to input the date when an organisation stopped being an employer
Leave
Following the introduction to Calculate Backdated Public Holiday (TOIL), our team is introducing a way to download and export leave adjustments, as well as a minor revision to exclude unpaid leave from calculations.
- New: Leave adjustments can now be downloaded and exported to a .csv file
- Update: The Calculate Backdated TOIL option will no longer consider unpaid leave as valid entries
Integrations
Telleroo Integration
The Telleroo integration is our newest integration in the UK Market, allowing businesses to send bulk salary payments directly through Telleroo.
You can check out how to connect and send payments in the articles below:
Workforce Integration
Buddy's integration with Workforce is one of the most robust. Due to the volume and amount of data being synced to and fro Workforce, our team has updated the integration and added new improvements in the process.
- Update: The sync from Workforce to Buddy has got a technical rehaul to increase efficiency over a large volume
- New: Added new department filter in Import Timesheets and Import Leave features
- Update: Award Mappings now support many-to-one links; each award is separated by a comma
- Fix: Resolved an issue where award mappings were not being updated when saving changes
- Fix: When leave is deleted from Workforce after it's already been marked as paid, the leave entry will no longer be deleted on Buddy.
BambooHR Integration
- Fix: Resolved an issue that was caused when reviewing bank changes
Other Changes
- New: Added a drill-down download for single transactions in Businesses to display the employees that were charged for that transaction