Release Summary
Welcome to the first release of Q3! This update is huge, and to ensure its quality, our team combined two releases into one. In this update, we are introducing new features and updates to save you more time!
This update's main highlights include:
- Pre-Filled FS4 and JobsPlus Engagement and Termination Forms
- New Employee Notes report
- Toggle payslips as viewable for the employee
- New bonus date in RunPayroll
- Added validation (e.g. preventing the end-date of payroll being before the start date)
- Improved visual elements (e.g. new info icon for Part-Time Qualified tax rate)
These are only a few of the elements! We recommend that you learn about all the changes in the release notes section below.
Release Notes
Employee Management
The People Page is getting many updates in this release! Users will be able to download pre-filled forms, have added validation on some inputs, and experience QoL changes to the user interface.
For more information regarding the forms, check out:
People Page Changes
- New: Added a new FS4 form
- New: Added a new JobsPlus Termination Form
- New: Added a new JobsPlus Engagement Form
- Update: The Role Page has been revamped!
- Update: The saving of Roles and Departments has been split
- New: Users can now see the employee's previous roles and previous departments
- New: Users can delete the latest role details or department changes
- New: Added info icon for the Part-Time (Qualified) Tax Rate. This clarifies that the custom rate is only for amounts over €10,000
- New: Users can now remove the BambooHR Integration Link for a single employee to stop syncing that employee's data
- Update: If an employee is set as Employed Full-Time Elsewhere, the Sickness Benefit rate will be defaulted to Not Applicable.
- Update: When Buddy admins delete employees (such as duplicate employees), the integration links (such as Bamboo or Deputy links) will be automatically desynced to prevent issues in the data sync.
- Changes to the Import People Template:
- Update: Added a new column for Pay Schedule
- Update: The template will automatically be renamed based on the business name. This will avoid confusion for users with multiple companies since each template is dynamic to the company settings.
- Fix: All text fields will be imported as text. This resolved uncommon incidents where if some fields (like ID Number) were fully numeric, these were saved as numbers and stopped the FS7 from being updated.
- Fix: The gender drop-down will now show the option selected immediately
- Fix: When clicking the re-hire button, the employee's personal data will be pre-filled again
Run Payroll
A new option introduces control over paying government bonuses early. Users who generate non-monthly payroll users or those whose pay date often occurs after the bonus due date will find this new feature useful! Our team has also introduced some additional validation and UX changes to improve the general experience of payroll.
- New: A new "Include Bonuses Until" date has been added under payroll date's More Options. Users have control over paying government bonuses early.
- Fix: Updated the limit of the 0% non-resident tax from €710 to €701
- Update: The end date is now restricted to not be before the period start date
- Update: When FSS is calculated as €0, the calculation will now be shown and hoverable
- Update: For users not using the Seriously Accurate package, Buddy will no longer show any warning in Run Payroll for timesheets not processed, as this is not relevant
- Update: Updating the print format of payslips for a neater layout and a smaller font for those that have the Weekly Breakdown enabled
- Fix: Fixed a scenario where salary deductions were not automatically included within the payslip if the details were not being expanded on prior to saving.
- Fix: Fixed an issue for fortnightly payroll where the dates from mid-year onwards were shifted by 1 week
- New: Added a new option for 'compressed' payslips that can be enabled in the Payroll Settings. This will issue all payslips in smaller font and only recommended for companies that have many items in their payslips.
- Fix: When uploading allowances, additional validation has been implemented
Payroll History
The changes to the Payroll History page include more control in making payslips visible (even after these are sent out), and a couple of minor fixes.
- New: In the payslips page, users can now toggle portal access of payslips individually.
Note that by making a payslip viewable, no individual email will be sent, but employees can log in and download it from their accounts. - Hotfix: Fixed a temporary issue which was causing Download All payslips to not download the file
- Fix: Resolved an issue regarding .pdf downloads if an apostrophe was included in the company name
- Changes to Import Previous Payrolls
- Fix: Resolved an issue which was causing an error when importing multiple pay periods in one sheet
- Fix: Resolved an issue which defaulted any pay periods with January dates
- Fix: Putting in a blank space in the Overtime or Part-Time Tax will no longer be treated as 0, but will be ignored.
Reports
A new report has been added to the Reports section to print out Employee Notes in one place. Significant improvements to existing reports were also made.
- New: Added a new Employee Notes Report. The report will include:
- employee notes that have a reminder within that period;
- and notes without reminder dates which were created during the selected period.
- Changes to the .xlsx Payroll Report
- Update: The value 0 will show instead of a dash when there is no value, to facilitate the use of formulae in spreadsheets.
- Fix: Fixed a minor issue where if the payslip was created as extra, the employee's department was not showing
- Fix: The .pdf Payroll Report has corrected an issue where the pre-tax included the basic pay for engaged or terminated employees.
- Update: Updated the sorting in the Employee Data Report, which now places the Salary Allowances after the bank details rather than between them
- Update: Removed access to two unusable reports. These will be reworked and reintroduced in future updates.
Leave Management
The leave management change includes updates to the Import Leave applications, facilitating the bulk import of leave and its re-importation upon any edits. Other improvements have also been made.
- Update: The sorting of employees in the "Add Leave Application" section has been updated to sort by active employees first.
- Fix: Fixed an issue where removing hours from Leave Adjustment resulted in it being saved as NaN, which used to prevent their balances from loading in some pages. Buddy will now save these as 0 hours instead.
- Fix: No more emails will be sent to employees over status changes to Public Holiday leave applications added through the Auto-PH settings.
- Changes to Import Leave Applications:
- New: Added a "Paid Leave" column. When this is set as true, leave will be considered already paid and therefore won't be included in upcoming payslips.
This option is ideal upon initial setup or importing backdated leave. - Fix: The "replace duplicate" option has been fixed and will no longer add multiples of the leave application when re-importing.
- New: Added a "Paid Leave" column. When this is set as true, leave will be considered already paid and therefore won't be included in upcoming payslips.
Settings
The settings page includes minor quality-of-life changes to improve workflow.
- Update: Allowances of Type "Other (Fringe)" will always be forced as taxable. It did not make sense that a user could add a non-cash, non-taxable allowance since it had no impact.
- Update: The Work Location Pin pop-up box will close once you submit a new pin.
- Update: When amending Pay Schedule details, if there are no payrolls created yet, Buddy will no longer warn you about changing dates
- Update: Added further validation to ensure that when adding a new company, a pay date cannot be skipped
- Update: Demo company name cannot be altered. It's a demo company for a reason!
- Fix: For users with companies in multiple jurisdictions, creating a new company will now properly show the layout required on the selected jurisdiction and not the latest active company.
- Fix: The search within the Xero Integration has been fixed, as it was showing the previous search's result instead of the current search's result.
Employee Portal and App
The web portal and the mobile app will have some different functionalities. Currently, the app is being tried out by some clients. Our team will make further announcements once all features are released.
- Web Portal
- New: Employees can now add comments to their timesheets
- Update: The Work Location section will no longer show if the employees/managers do not have permission to apply for these. This will be implemented on the mobile app at a later date.
- Hotfix 25th July: A hotfix was released to resolve an issue for managers in companies that had no work locations
- Fix: Resolved an issue where some employees were not able to access their employee portal
- Update: Removed the requirement for employees to have a Role listed before accessing their employee portal.
- Fix: When editing pending leave, managers will now see the correct leave balances.
- Update: When editing multi-day leave and removing the hours from all days except one, the date to and from will now be adjusted and defaulted to the single day with hours listed.
- Mobile App
- Fix: When enabling "Enable Mobile Clock-In", employees can punch in and out for timesheets, regardless of the option to manually add timesheets.
Billing Related Changes
- Account Suspension (New):
- We have introduced an account suspension to activate after two weeks and four attempts at payment failure. More information can be found on: How and When Will I be Charged for my Subscription?
- Incorrect Charges (Fixes)
- The account charge has been updated to no longer consider a €0 value payslip as a chargeable payslip. Our team is looking into remedying this for all users impacted automatically.
- The charges will no longer count leave entries for terminated employees as chargeable. This means that if an employee booked leave in September was terminated in July, they will no longer count as active for September.
If you believe your billing was inaccurate due to this, let us know at billing@buddy.hr and our team will correct it immediately.
Other
- Update: In the timesheet page, admin users can now view photos that are attached to punches
- New: The .csv timesheet upload will show a new warning when the browser language is inconsistent with the date format
- Fix: Fixed an issue where reset password was not sending a request on some instances