Release Summary
January is generally the most stressful month for payroll professionals. Last update, Buddy has focused on new year changes, such as implementing COLA improvements and Minimum Wage Checks. Please note that we are changing values in this update, so please read further.
In addition, the primary focus for this update is to improve your experience with end-of-year submissions. Here is a summary of what to expect:
- Additional formats for SS and F3 electronic lodgement files
- Tax Forms handle a wider range of atypical cases
- Improvements to Bulk Uploads and Importations (employee, allowances, payslips, and timesheet)
- New functionality for Workforce Integrations
- New payslip save date in payroll reports
Before submitting end-of-year files, we suggest you regenerate the tax forms to ensure they reflect the latest changes. In addition, our team has prepared an informative guide to help you through the submission process: All About the End of Year Submissions and FSSXpress™.
Read below for the full list of changes included in this update.
Important Notice on Minimum Wage & COLA Review
For those employees who have completed 1 or 2 years of service, their minimum wage, in the previous update, was increased by an additional €3 or €6 per week increase, respectively.Unfortunately, this week, we have been informed that this measure is no longer in force, despite no official mention in Legal Notices or the DIER's website.Because of this, we are reverting this supplement from the minimum wage checks. The Minimum Wage is therefore set as €213.54 for all employees over 18, regardless of how long they have been employed with your company.Those of you who have already applied COLA and believe you may have been impacted, you can either keep the supplement or update the wages:- Go to the employee's salary details
- Delete the latest salary
- Refresh the People Page
- Re-Apply COLA
Release Notes
Tax Forms
Tax Forms are the primary focus of this update. The inclusion of .csv format for electronic lodgement files allows users to extract the data to a spreadsheet. In addition, we have updated several instances and edge-cases to improve the generation of both the .pdf forms and the electronic lodgement data.
- New: Both the SS and F3 electronic lodgement files can now be directly exported as .csv
- Update: Employees who are issued only €0 payslips in a year will no longer be included in FS3 or FS7 files
- Please note that if an FS3 has been created for previous years, you will need to contact Customer Support to assist
- Fix: Corrected the output of the SSC in the FS3 for employees in Category A in January 2023
- Fix: Resolved an issue where specific payroll data would block an FS3 from being generated
- Fix: The F3 electronic lodgement data will now include employees who moved from being taxable in Malta to not being taxable in Malta mid-year.
- Fix: The FS3 will no longer be split if the marriage date provided is before the engagement date.
- Hotfix (12th January): We've resolved an issue that caused anyone who had a marriage date before the 1st of January 2023 to have an extra NaN FS3. Note that if you see any NaN FS3s,
- Fix: Fixed an issue where allowances set as Director's Fees were being reported in double in the FS5
- Fix: Resolved an issue where having part-time employees on €0 gross was incorrectly lowering the number of full-time payees in the FS5
- Fix: Resolved a similar issue where employees on part-time qualified that have exceeded the 10,000 were still showing as part-time payees, even in months where they had no part-time qualifiable income
- Update: Employees on Qualified Sports tax rate will now be reported as main or part-time payees, depending on their employment status.
- Fix: Apart from the above changes, we've also updated the number of payees in FS5 to count more uniquely and accurately the number of different employees across multiple pay-periods and schedules.
- Fix: Fixed a rare occurrence where if the Maternity combined reached 100c, this would cause the cents option to display 100 instead of 0.
- Hotfix (12th January): Updated the FSSXpress™ password encoding to prevent errors for passwords with special characters
- Hotfix (15th January): Updated the FSSXpress™ generation for exceptions where employee had 0 basic hours
Payroll
Apart from Tax Forms, we're introducing a couple minor improvements to the payroll process. Our team also released two hotfixes last week to resolve a particular incident with Process Timesheets.
- Hotfix (4th January): Resolved an issue where users could not Process Timesheets if employees were assigned unpaid hours while having timesheets processed on a weekly basis
- Hotfix (5th January): Resolved an issue where, in a specific combination of settings, the 25th December was not being added as a Public Holiday automatically.
- Fix: If an employee is on reduced hours per week (e.g. 30 hours), having a fixed allowance will now pay the full amount set in the salary details instead of a pro-rata based on 40 hours.
- Fix: Fixed an instance where unprocessing timesheets would not remove any created paid or unpaid leave (through the AccuPay™ feature) if the page had not been refreshed.
- Hotfix (15th January): Release an update on the numbering of pay periods, primarily for weekly pay periods, due to having 53 weeks in 2024.
In addition to Payroll Changes, our team added columns to our Payroll Reports.
The .pdf payroll report will now include a Taxable column showing the taxable gross. This will help users identify the correct totals, especially when car allowance is included.
The .xlsx payroll report in the Reports section has two new columns:
- Status
This will show whether the payslip is currently drafted or ready. - Last Updated
This will display the value when the payslip was last edited.
Importations (Bulk Uploads)
Uploading data through spreadsheets is a great way to streamline workflow and save time. Our team has resolved minor difficulties experienced with different imports to improve your experience of these tools.
- Employee Import
- Fix: Departments are now created during the import, if they had not been pre-created
- Allowance Import
- Fix: Users can now import Paid Leave without causing issues
- Fix: Having an #N/A in the ID will now skip the #N/A row and point a warning. We still encourage users to double-check all their files before uploading.
- Payroll History Import
- Fix: Resolved an issue where importing a payslip for an employee terminated at the beginning of the pay period (e.g. 1st of the month) would show an error that the employee dates are invalid.
- Timesheet .csv Upload
- Fix: Resolved an issue that caused crashing when mapping new fields due to invalid dates
- Fix: When importing timesheets across years (like 2nd January 2024 and 31st December 2023), the filter will correctly filter the dates without difficulty.
Workforce Integration
Our integration with Workforce has received a significant upgrade. This introduces new features to facilitate the integration, as well as new settings that allow timesheets to be rounded to rosters, which are sent back to Workforce
- New: A new Link Employee modal has been added to show all unlinked employees and allow for selection.
- New: Employees can now be auto-mapped from the front end by having their name, ID number (and payroll ID), or email address matched with Workforce profiles.
- New: In the integration settings, integrated users can switch between Buddy and Workforce as their main costing methods.
- New: New auto-rounding options have been added, which will in turn edit the timesheets on Workforce
- New: New User Interface options which allow timesheets to be split at midnight. Please note that these are not yet live and are still in testing.
- Update: When importing timesheets, the timezone is saved to ensure this displays correctly between users and platforms, especially when users are using systems from different countries.
BambooHR Integration
- New: BambooHR integration users can now push salaries from Buddy to BambooHR. This will facilitate updating COLA on multiple platforms.
- New: Added an Audit Log that shows changes, warnings and errors when reviewing the Employee Sync
Other
Several other changes did not fit a grander theme. However, they still have a significant impact:
- Update: Our team has revised the historical salary data to ensure consistency between older data (from 2018 to 2021) and our new database formats from 2022 onwards. This should effectively have little impact on our users except to increase consistency and reduce the chance of abnormalities impacted by updates.
- Update: Two changes relating to saving of salaries:
- Adding a termination date before a future-saved salary will now auto-delete any salaries after the termination date
- Adding a salary on an already terminated employee will automatically assign the termination date as the salary's end date.
- Our team has also updated previously saved data to ensure it matches the above changes.
- Update: If a company is chosen on the Starter Plan, advisors will still be able to Run Payroll if they have an active Partner License.
- Fix: The Leave Situation Report has been updated to reflect all changes published in the previous update
- New: A new functionality was introduced to print cheques from Payroll History. Currently, these are aimed at a specific layout.
- Update: If a company has multiple pay schedules that overlap the same period frequency (e.g. two monthly payrolls), Buddy will now save a separate set of reports for each pay schedule.
- Update: Renamed the "Default Daily Leave Hours" to "Maximum Daily Leave Hours" in the Leave Settings. The functionality remains the same; however, the previous name misled some of our users.
- Hotfix (15th January): Some employees could not be terminated! Our team added a fix to overcome this.
- Hotfix (15th January): Resolved an issue that prevented users from updating weekdays on some employees.