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Release Notes: Importation Efficiency Update (24th March 2025)

Jeremy
  • Updated

Payroll is not just about calculations; it's a whole experience.

Buddy has implemented customer feedback to make payroll and employee management more time-efficient. Here are the highlights of this update:

  • A new type of allowance import, supporting override rates for hourly/daily rates.
  • Option to set a default rate for hourly/daily allowance within the company settings
  • New experience for employee import mapping
    • saved templates across bureau
    • different formats selectable for each employee section (e.g. Salary, Tax, Pension, etc.)
  • Improvements to accounting journaling and integrations

For the full details on these changes, check out the release notes below.

Release Notes

Run Payroll

Payroll is more than accuracy and compliance. In this update, our team has focused on introducing several Quality of Life updates, such as the ability to override hourly rates upon a new type of Pay Item import.

  • Update: The pay item dropdown now shows the pay items ordered alphabetically
  • Upload Pay Items
    • New:  Introduced a new supported format where users can import the rate of pay (e.g. for hourly rates) that will override any existing rates. Refer to Bulk Upload Pay Items using a .Csv Sheet
    • Update: Import now supports values with commas
    • Fix: Resolved an issue where uploading pay items was not showing any visual confirmation
    • Fix: Importing pay items of type deductions will now properly calculate them as deductions
  • Parallel Run Changes
    • Update: Employee mapping now immediately shows the number of mapped employees and shows any failed mapping when hovering over the invalid percentage.
    • Update: Added option to override deductions during parallel runs
  • Fix: Resolved an issue where blank pension contributions where blocking payroll from being saved.

Screenshot of Custom Pay Item Rates with new Upload Pay Item Format

Pay Items with Custom Rates.png

 

FPS Submission

Everything makes more sense when they're in the same page. The FPS submission flow has an upgraded user interface.

    • Update: Re-designed the User Interface for FPS submissions
      • Clicking on the HMRC icon now opens up the option to submit FPS
      • Errors, submission and response details can be accessed directly from that same button

Payslip

Buddy's payslips are designed to look nice and be easily understood. We've improved some printing options to show and describe the payslip even better.

  • New: Introduced a new option to hide the Basic and Leave hours from payslip
  • Update: Updated the address format in payslips to be more space-efficient
  • Update: When choosing the option to "show hourly rates on payslip", this will now also show the rate for every hourly pay item and overtime
  • Fix: Taxable Gross now includes any Notional Benefit items.
  • Update: Employer contributions will now specify how much of the pension contributions are related to the Salary Sacrifice

People

Based on feedback of customers and our Onboarding Team, the importation of employees has received a large update to improve the user experience. Primarily, templates can now be saved with custom names and can be utilised across bureaus, speeding up the import process. 

  • Fix: Updated the importation of Attachment of Earning Orders to include protected earnings.
  • Fix: Resolved an issue with grades where certain salary settings were not being auto-applied
  • Import Employees
    • Update: Updated the importation of employee import to support saving multiple templates with custom names. These templates can be used across a bureau.
    • Update: Employee import format can now be chosen per employee section. The re-importation method has been significantly improved to allow users to upload employees through multiple sheets instead of a single file.
    • Update: Standard NIC Types are now imported as Standard instead of showing as blank (default).
    • Update: Working Days are now imported accordingly, with several new options added for mapping values.
    • Update: Added validation requiring engagement date for initial partial imports 
    • Update: Departments created in the import sheet will now be created automatically upon import
  • Update: Previous Earnings section will now show the tax year based on how it was initially saved.
  • Update: The wording on the Starting Declaration has been updated to show 6th April as the start of tax year.
  • Fix: Resolved an issue where tax changes could not be replaced at the existing effective date

Screenshot of Choosing Import Templates

Import Template Names.png

Settings

Facilitated some new settings, particularly relating to overtime and pay items, to simplify certain procedures and advanced settings.

  • Update: Any new overtime rate is defaulted as Pensionable. 
  • Fix: Corrected the description of some pro-rata mechanisms to reflect the actual calculations.
  • Fix: Resolved an issue where certain customers were being asked to sign T&Cs every login.
  • Update: Introduced default preset rates for hourly and daily types of pay items. These will be used if they are not set at an employee level. The upload of pay item settings have been updated to support this input.
    Pay Item Settings Hourly.png

Reports

We've fixed a couple of issues that cropped up after recent changes that have taken reports to the next level

  • Update: When selecting a manual date- range, the pay period filter is de-selected in favour of the input.
  • Fix: Resolved an issue where journal reports could not be exported for some pay periods.
  • Fix: Resolved an issue where employee data reports could not be downloaded for some companies

Accounting Journals

After the launch of the Accounting subpage, we've implemented a few changes based on initial feedback.

  • Fix: Updated the naming of "Cost Centre" from the previous Americanised spelling, "Cost Center"
  • Fix: Updated the logic of all items of type deductions to properly reflect and reconcile journals 
  • UK Fix: Updated the logic of how Salary Sacrifice is handled to ensure it is accounted to the relevant journals

Integrations

Our team has resolved technical issues and implemented some feedback on various types of integrations. 

  • BambooHR:
    • Fix: Resolved an issue where imported employees were not being successfully imported
  • Fyorin:
    • Fix: Updated how address details are cleaned up and sent to Fyorin to prevent sync issues
  • Telleroo:
    • Fix: Resolved an issue where sending payments for same-day payment was not being accepted
  • Xero
    • Fix: Resolved a Xero issue where rounding could have led to a 0.01c discrepancy, which failed journals to sync
    • Update: Changed the journal to share a totals journal instead of a detailed one per employee

Bureau

  • New: Added Payroll Operations as a new role in the Bureau permissions levels. These have access to bureau settings and white-label options but not any client details.
  • Update: Importing clients will now default the Jurisdiction based on the bureau settings without requiring an additional column

Other

  • Fix: Resolved an issue where Managers could not access the employee portal if they did not have any employee profile

 

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