Continuous Enhancements
Throughout the year, Buddy continues to listen to all our users as well as our team members for feedback. This month, we have introduced some new features (Multi-Factor Authentication), as well as have released some fixes to improve our existing functions.
Multi-Factor Authentication
When dealing with Personnel and HR data, it is imperative that the utmost security practices are taken to secure your data from being breached. Although Buddy is already a secure service that is ISO Certified, it would also be beneficial to ensure increased security on your logins.
For this reason, we are now introducing a setting where you can enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for your team.
- Authentication App-based MFA has been introduced
- In the Company Settings, you can enable MFA
- for all Administrators and Managers
- for all Employees
With this change, we have also migrated the login data to our updated database. For more information on the MFA, please refer to our guide: What should I know about Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)?
Fixes and Other Changes
- Payroll
- On payslips with Unpaid Sick, the Payslip .pdf has been updated to still show the correct Basic Pay, where in some instances this was showing less than the actual amount. This was just a visual error which did not impact Total Earnings or Take-Home Pay.
- The statutory bonus calculation has been updated so that if newly engaged employees take unpaid leave, this is deducted from their pro-rata calculation
- The bonuses have been updated so that if the employee is terminated on the last day of the period (e.g. 30th June), the full bonus is paid instead of a pro-rata amount
- The weekly allowance calculation has been updated on termination to include a more accurate calculation of the number of weeks of bonus
- The Net-Pay calculation has been revised to improve consistency and accuracy throughout each month
- We have added a custom setting that is now being used by a few select clients in which the bonus can be paid in Gross, even when the basic salary is paid in Net
- When adding an extra payslip through the "Pay Terminated Employee" function, the Base Hours will now be defaulted to 0.
- Processing Timesheets
- Half-Pay Sick calculation has been reworked for part-time employees on Variable Hours when using Process Timesheets functionality for improved accuracy
- If using weekly overtime calculations, Leave of 0 hours in the last week of the previous month will no longer cause an error
- We have changed the way weekly calculations are done so that they only occur if you are processing the Sunday of that week. Basically, if you are processing timesheets until any other day (e.g. Saturday), weekly targets for overtime will not be processed within that payroll, but will be processed in the following payroll along with the Sunday of that week.
- Upload Allowances
- All errors should be visible when an allowance fails to import
- If an employee was previously terminated but an allowance is being imported, Buddy will now automatically create a new payslip for that employee
- Payroll Reports
- Improvements to the excel report have been made to accurately report the Basic Pay when there were instances of half-pay sick
- The excel payroll report figures are now being rounded to 2 decimal places for consistency with other reports
- The .pdf report's overtime columns have been updated to include the sum of all overtimes, when more than one overtime rate is used within a payslip
- Leave Management
- Leave for recently terminated employees will now be included in the downloaded data of the Leave Detailed Report
- Updated the Leave Entitlement calculation for part-timer employees to more accurately count the basic hours to date. This predominantly fixes a rare issue where employees who had salary changes mid-month had those hours counted twice for entitlement purposes
- When viewing leave without using a Department filter, now the correct department is displayed next to each employee
- Leave Detailed Report should now show the correct department for all employees, instead of 'undefined' for a few employees who were saved in a particular short period.
- While editing leave, the hours requested will show the full amount instead of the daily limit (which was generally 8).
- Login
With the migration of login details to the new database, a few issues cropped up that we have now updated:- Email login is no longer case-sensitive (i.e. capital letters will not impact your ability to log in)
- Emails that had an extra space in the original registration or employee data have been amended to exclude this space
- Other Changes
- For those clients with multiple pay schedules (e.g. every 4 weeks, monthly), re-opening a payroll will only re-open later payrolls of that pay schedule, without re-opening later payrolls of different pay schedules
- Import Payroll function now supports import of covid-19 wage supplements and net-pay top-ups to improve the continuity when importing new companies on Buddy
- Re-hired employees will only be shown by their most recent agreement when choosing employees to add leave for as a leave manager.
- Import Payroll function now recognises the ID and no longer requires
- We have updated the auto-company select upon login to try and load users in their company
- Grades can now enable the "OP Tax Opt Out"
- Visual Changes to the Integration page in Settings.