Buddy Release: Major Software Update (20th May 2022)

Summary of Update

Today's update brings a large amount of minor changes aimed at further ameliorating the user experience, along with some other fixes and updates. A few of the critical changes have been deployed prior to the previous payroll period, however most changes come into effect today after significant QA testing. Below find the list of changes:

Payroll Related Changes

Throughout the past few months we have determined improvements that we can deliver. Although most of these changes impact a small number of clients/employees, we are eager to update Buddy to ensure an optimal experience across as many uses of payroll as possible. 

• Non-responsible Spouses
  • On the year of marriage, the pays following marriage date will be taxed anew, separately of the portion earned prior to marriage.
  • This is due to the way such spouses need to submit their taxes on year of marriage. In a future update, Buddy will also automatically split their FS3 in two accordingly
• Process Timesheets
  • The first batch of changes applies to those who calculate overtime and under hours per week, rather than pay period
    • If a full-time employee has no leave or worked hours within a week, they will now also show as working under hours. This will allow users to decide what should happen in these instances.
    • When processing overtime per week, only the weeks ending within the timesheet cut-off period will now be shown for the calculation of under hours. 
    • Fix: Leave processed in previous month will still be used in the next month's weekly overtime calculation, if the leave happened in the week that spans both months.
  • The second batch of process timesheet changes affect those with leave cut-off dates prior to the pay period end
    • Leave after the leave cut-off date will no longer be processed within the payroll.
    • Auto-pay leave for casual employees will now be processed and added as the leave cut-off date, rather than the pay period end
    • Improved the unprocess timesheets function to unprocess any auto-paid leave if the leave cut-off dates were changed between the time timesheets were processed and unprocessed. Regardless, it is ideal that cut-offs are set and checked prior to starting the payroll process.
• Government Bonuses
  • An update was made to ensure that non-applicable bonuses are no longer included. Particularly, this means if termination bonus was paid, but then the termination date got cancelled, the bonuses should automatically be removed without having to press Clear Payslip.
• Upload Allowances
  • Updated the allowance upload to ensure when an employee has been re-employed, the allowances are placed into their most recent salary
• Other
  • Half-pay sick has been revisited to ensure the Total Earnings in the payslip reflect the amount paid properly, when using process timesheets function.
  • Allowances set as Commission Type will now be calculated as a percentage as originally intended.
  • Updated payday to ensure "Last Day" uses the last day of the pay period, rather than the last Friday of the period.
  • FSS and MFC in the Payroll Summary have been interchanged back to properly reflect the correct amount

Add New Employee

Earlier this year we have updated the way users can add new employees, particularly by using a new segmented modal. One of the bigger changes is to allow users to stop half-way and continue where they left off. In this update, we have made some changes to improve this feature to allow for a smoother experience.

• Incomplete Modals
  • Closing the "Add New Employee" modal on any page will properly mark the employee as incomplete so that the user can continue where they left off
    • This was only happening in some stages
  • Going back from the Previous Earnings section does not lose any of the already saved data
  • Going back from to Tax Details section will now show the previously saved tax data
  • Improved the way editing incomplete (unfinished) employee details. The modal will now show all the updated and correct data.
• Date of Birth
  • Date of Birth is once again a required field
  • Date of Birth has some additional restrictions on age to ensure that it is reasonable (i.e. no 1000-year-old employees (apologies to any vampires!)
• When setting an employee as a full-timer, the weekly hours will be pre-filled as 40 hours. This can still be changed, but we hope to reduce the mistakes of users forgetting to input the weekly hours. 
• When using grades, removing the 'grade lock' will no longer automatically remove the grade allowances from the Salary Details.

User Interface Changes

Visual and textual consistency are important, particularly when designing an easy-to-use software. The following changes aim to improve the visual appearance of Buddy on smaller screens, as well as to have the text be more easily understood by first time users. 

• Salary Details
  • The Net Amount checkbox has now been replaced by a drop-down called Salary Type. This allows user to select whether salary is Gross or Net.
  • Applying grades which contain the setting for Variable Hours now automatically hides the request for Weekly Hours
  • Changed wording when applying grade to "Overwrite Current Salary" instead of "Fix a previous mistake" to achieve consistency with the text when updating Salary Details
• Tax Details
  • Added "Standard" as option for Social Security Status, instead of a blank option
  • Added "Not Applicable" as option for Sick Benefit Rate, instead of a blank option  
• There were several changes to alignment to improve the visual consistency in the following pages:
  • Salary Details
  • Tax Details
  • Run Payroll
  • Add New Employee modal 
• Changed the Calendar spacing when adding a Work Location entry with multiple days
• The date fields in the Reports section will now display properly on the Safari browser

Timesheet and Work Location Updates

Buddy is not only a payroll software, but it may also be used to keep track of Timesheets and Work Locations. Through our thorough testing, we have identified certain instances with these features which could be improved:

• Work Locations
  • Attachments that were uploaded can now be viewed
  • Comments that were added can now be viewed
  • Denial modal has been added (users will now be able to add comments when denying a work location application)
  • We added a loader (that will not impact most users) to ensure the settings have fully loaded prior to adding work location entries
  • Clearing the dates while adding a Work Location Entry will no longer crash the page
  • Work Location entries can no longer be added outside of employment period
  • Work Location now requires the user to select a location before submitting
• Timesheets
  • Deleting an entry will now specify that the entry was deleted, rather than the generic "saved" message.
  • Fixed an issue that if logging into buddy.hr/timesheets right away before accessing any other page, the page got stuck at the loading phase
  • You can no longer entry a timesheet entry whose break is as long as the whole timesheet
  • Employees terminated over 2 months ago will no longer show in the list to add timesheets for. This will practically reduce the number of results in searches and minimise the chance for mistakes

Leave Management Changes

Having a leave management system integrated within your payroll system is important. This ensures that the leave data within your payslip is accurate, as required by legal notice. The following changes to our leave management system should facilitate the use of this module, as well as improve the availability of data for different use-cases. 

• Leave Application Filters
  • Improved filters to ensure applications whose period is not wholly within the filtered period will still show (e.g. showing a leave entry fo 15th May to 31st May when filtering for Leave taken between 22nd and 28th May)
  • When re-applying filters, old views will be fully cleared to ensure that the viewed applications all pass through the new applied filter. This only impacted clients with large volume of leave applications.
• Add Leave Application
  • If the first employee is on reduced hours, these settings will no longer be used as the company default when changing the application to a different employee.
  • Clearing one of the dates will no longer crash the web page.
• Leave Balances
  • Added a toggle to "Include Future Leave Applications"
    • This toggle will help admins to view balances either as at today (if switched off) or as at end-of-year (if turned on), without having to resort to downloading the Leave Situation.
• Paid Leave Reporting
  Although Paid Leave is an allowance generally paid at end-of-year or at termination, there are instances where a portion of the previous year's carryover is paid. We have improved our reporting of Paid Leave to ensure that any amount paid as allowance is listed separately from the consumed amounts. 
  • We are now showing the Paid Leave as a separate amount in the balance list in the payslip
  • We have also added a column to reflect the Paid Leave in the Leave Situation Report
• Custom Leave Types
  • When adding or approving Custom Leave, the action is now confirmed and no longer stuck on saving. This fix also applies for the managers. 
  • Added validations throughout Buddy to ensure the custom name is shown in all locations (such as payslips) rather than the internal numerical ID for the leave type. 

Employee Management and Portal

Using the employee portal for employees to access payslips and/or manage their leave is a great way to reduce the workload from your department managers. Along with the recent update (Minor Employee Portal Update) delivered earlier this week, we have made more changes. These are aimed at improving the workflow between admins, managers and employee when it comes to managing leave.

• Sending Invites
  • Invite Employee's email content has been adapted to reflect that the invite is for a new account, not necessarily a new employment.
  • Buddy now informs the user that an invite has been sent to the employee after clicking Invite Employee.
  • If you send payslips to an employee who does not have an account, now Buddy will automatically send an invite to that employee. This will help you out in case you forgot to invite the employee
    • This invite does not apply if you are sending .pdf payslips
• Leave Emails
  • Clicking on Approve or Cancel within the email should immediately redirect to the portal and auto-approve or cancel the leave, without requiring further action.
  • When employees have changed departments, we added checks to ensure the current manager of their current department is the one receiving emails for their leave applications.
  • Added an additional failsafe so that admins receive the leave application should the employee's department have no manager. 
  • When employees apply to cancel an approved leave, this will now send an email to the manager that they have a Pending Cancellation.
• Employee Portal
  
  • Terminated employees will now be notified that they are terminated from the profile they are viewing
  • Added restrictions on terminated employees to ensure they will not be able to apply for leave once they are terminated
  • Added further restrictions - when commenting on Denied Leave, this will no longer change the status of the leave application
  • Added further failsafe checks to prevent the extremely rare occurrence where a leave application's date details were not properly used by the web browser, resulting in a large hour application
  • Updated the location from where "Add Leave" takes its defaults from. Employees whose salary details have been updated in 2022 will now have their leave hours defaulted as to their latest agreement. 
  • For a rare instance for 2021 payslips, the SSC preview was showing both employee and employer amount for few employees on Category B. This has now been resolved.
• Manager Portal
  • If a leave is not yet processed in payroll and within lock dates, managers will be able to edit it, despite it being in the past

Other Updates

Apart from the above updates, we have made several changes in different sections.

• Fix: Department shows in the employee profile even after they have been terminated.
• When updating Company Settings, one no longer requires to refresh to view the updated settings.
• Made some changes for Buddy to wait for all of the company settings prior to loading any other page.
• When going to the Payslips screen, this will default to the last concluded payroll instead of the current payroll
• Payroll Report (.pdf)
  • Updated currency format in reports to improve readability (changed from €1000 to €1,000). This is consistent with the change done in payslips earlier this year.
  • Leave hours and value will both be rounded to 2 decimal places. This should resolve an issue where reports were issued with values up to 10 decimal places.
• Employee Data Report (.xlsx)
  • Updated to ensure that the salaries' hourly rates are now shown as number instead of text
• Re-issuing 2020 payslips in V2 will now retain the consumed balance of 2020 instead of 0 hours.
• Company Bank Details are now also being validated, similar to the validation we have implemented for the employee bank details
• Permission Settings
  • Increased the restriction on the permission settings
    • View-only access can no longer mark FS3s or payslips as visible to the employees
  • When a user has no access to a specific page (e.g. Billing), it will no longer show in the menu (even though it was already inaccessible). This prevents the user from knowing what pages they do not have access to
  • Fixed Issue when sending an Invite to a user that did not have a Buddy Account
• Billing Page Redirections
  • Clicking on the number of Active Employees will now redirect to the People page
  • Clicking on the number of Payrolls Run will now redirect to the Payroll History page
• Billing
  • Legacy clients who are on pay monthly agreements will be able to continue to pay and purchase the monthly credits
  • When concluding payroll, if client has exactly the amount of credits required to issue payroll (i.e. they will end up at 0 credits), they will be no longer required to make an additional purchase
• XERO Integration
  • Overtime and Government Bonuses names are properly displayed in the item list in the bills sent to XERO.
• Salary Allowances
  • When updating salary allowances, unchanged allowances will remain active. This resolves an unusual issue where one of the salary allowances was deactivated upon saving new allowances. 
  • Made changes to ensure Salary Allowance is saved as a number instead of array. This means that re-saving the payslip won't re-add the allowance again.
• Grades
  • Increased validation to ensure only numerical values are inserted in Salaries and Weekly Hours, preventing any user mistakes (such as extra space).
  • Grades that were set as "Variable Hours" were still saving 40 weekly hours in the backend, which was causing part-time employees to show more leave entitlement. If you have such grades, it would be advised that you re-save these to ensure their settings are updated.
• Salary and Tax Details can now be edited if the termination date is in the future (i.e. definite contracts)
• Allowance Settings
  • Added a validation when adding allowances and overtimes to ensure all the drop-down settings are selected
    • If you save while keeping a field empty, you will be notified that a detail is missing