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Buddy Release: User Focused Update (12th August 2022)

Jeremy
  • Updated

User-Focused Update 

This week's update is two-fold in purpose. As always, Buddy strives to improve the experience of its customers. Thus, based both on internal and customer feedback, the update contains a multitude of enhancements and fixes that will allow users to have an improved experience and more options.

Moreover, we have now fully turned off any reliance on the original version of Buddy, sometimes mentioned as Buddy V1. All our features and functions now operate from the same backend at much better performance. These changes will allow our service to be more scaleable and perform significantly better for users with larger volumes of employees.

Notably, the Work-Life Balance Directive also came into effect on the 2nd of August. Although the changes for this directive are not yet complete, our team is communicating with official authorities to ensure all additions are added as per the Legal Notice that has been published recently. 

Payroll Related Improvements

Run Payroll

The Run Payroll page is perhaps the most critical page of Buddy. We have introduced some updates that facilitate the user experience, such as allowing users to change the payday and upload overtime hours in bulk.

  • Payday can now be changed manually by the user at any time, regardless of the Company Settings.
    • Once Payday is changed, users are still required to Edit and then Calculate & Save any existing payslip to show the updated pay date.
  • Added further validations to prevent instances of payslips having either a gross or net amount less than €0
  • Upload Allowances
    • The Upload Allowances function has been updated to allow the importation of Overtime hours.
    • When the "repeat allowances" is turned off, it will now overwrite the overtime or allowances inputs, rather than duplicating them. If turned on, it will still allow for the creation of multiple instances of the same type of allowance.
  • Improved the Add Allowance drop-down to allow overflow and be able to scroll as expected.
  • When employees are on Mixed Salaries (i.e. Salary changes that occur during the payroll period), the Social Security Contributions will be paid for both rates at the correct calculations. 
  • For companies who schedule Sunday as part of the 40 basic hours, any hours paid at x2 Sunday Rate will also generate statutory entitlements, as they are now fully considered as basic hours (at a different rate). This currently only impacts one organisation.

Payslips and Payroll History

Along with the Run Payroll changes, we have a few changes to Payslips and Payroll History. These changes intend to make accessing the payroll data more simple and clearer. 

  • The postcode of both the employee and the employer is now visible in payslips.
  • Hourly Allowances will now show the number of hours once again.
  • Payroll periods will now show the start and end date in Payroll History. This should help those using non-monthly payroll periods to identify which dates the payroll period covers.
  • Changes to companies with multiple pay schedules (e.g. Monthly and Fortnightly payrolls for varying employees):
    • The sorting of payrolls in Payroll History and the Payslip page has been changed to a sort by date, rather than by period number.
    • Fixed issue where opening a backdated Monthly Payroll also re-opened periods of other pay schedules 
  • For companies who have no departments, we have added a further check to only include payslips in the 'all payslips' file, without any pages of "No Department" 

Leave Management Changes

With the Work-Life Balance Directive coming into effect on 2nd August 2022, Buddy has added the option for users to add the following leave types:

  • Parental
  • Paternity
  • Carer's Leave

Our Support Team will soon list further information to specify some information that is not yet publicly available (such as that carer's leave is unpaid and does not generate any statutory entitlements).

Buddy's team has included further updates to improve the user experience:

  • The Leave Situation Report now also includes a row for Sick Leave.
    • Two new columns that reflect the Half-Pay Sick consumed amount and balance
  • When adding or editing leave applications, the date keyboard input has been updated to read the format based on the user's region. In other words, Buddy now also supports DD/MM/YYYY format as valid input. 
  • Improvements to the Auto-Create Public Holiday option.
    • An issue for the Auto-Create Public Holiday has been resolved for newer employees hired within the last 3 months. Their average hours will now be properly calculated from the date of engagement, rather than over 3 months.
    • Averaging out of Public Holiday Leave on employees working a 4-day week when 'Auto-Create Public Holiday Leave' is enabled.
  • Improvements to the calculation of daily hours have been made for multi-day applications, particularly for employees working reduced hours. 
  • When filtering leave applications by department, leave applications of terminated employees will now be visible. This should provide admins and managers with the full picture of all leave taken within the specified filters.
  • One of our previous updates has negatively impacted a few leave applications. On the 4th of August, our team quickly reverted this change to ensure all consumed leave shows as consumed.
  • Any Custom Leave Types will no longer deduct entitlement based on unpaid leave, and hence will be more fixed based on the Custom Leave Rules. In future updates, we'll be introducing ways for users to create custom leave types through the User Interface.

Timesheet Processing Improvements

The Time and Attendance modules are not used by all companies, but when they are used, they tend to save a lot of time and cost from the manual calculation of hours. We have a few updates aimed at improving this functionality across some rare instances.

  • For those who enabled the Pay Exact Option for newly engaged employees, employees who are employed on the first day of the pay period will now be excluded and treated like other employees who worked the full pay period.
    This change mainly means they will be included in the checking report of Under Hours
  • The Process Timesheets function has been updated to no longer crash in the case that an employee has an hourly rate enabled at a rate of €0 per hour. 
  • The custom rule for Days in Period in the Time and Attendance Rules has been updated to include any day in which the hours worked or on leave are larger or equal to 1 hour.
  • For those using the Deputy Integration, we have now disabled the original sync that used to happen when users clicked "Export Timesheets" from Deputy.
    Timesheets and Leave entries will continue to sync upon approval, as well as upon the Import from Deputy function. 

Employee Management Improvements

Managing employee data is central to all features provided by Buddy. Thus, we have made changes to improve the visibility of certain data, as well as updates to aid users with their inputting of data and reducing data input mistakes. 

  • The People page's filtering has been updated: writing "terminated" in the search field will now show only the terminated employees.
  • The checkbox "Employee Pays Minimum (10%) National Insurance" has moved right under the Social Security Status to improve the cohesion of data inputting.
  • When adding new employees, users can no longer skip the input of "Tax Rate". This is required for all employees.
  • Improvements to the Tax Details page were made:
    • Deleting Tax Details will now properly delete the latest Tax Rate from the database
    • And previously deleted Tax Details will no longer appear in the Tax Detail history
  • The descriptions in the Audit Logs of Salary Changes have been improved to be more clear and understandable to users. Buddy is further working on introducing more Audit Logs in other locations
  • The Employee Data report will not also show recurring allowances, along with the other salary details. This report is accessible from the Reports page.

Other Updates

Not all updates can be clustered in bulk. The remaining changes impact a few pages or functions but are yet important to note. 

  • Multi-Factor Authentication
    • Enabling MFA for Admins & Managers no longer enforces all employees to use MFA to log into their employee portal.
    • An additional 30 seconds buffer has been added to the refreshing of MFA codes. This gives users the chance to insert the 6-digit key even if the key expires while they are typing it. 
  • Employee Portal
    • The amount of hours in the "Add Time Entry" modal has been locked and is no longer editable.
    • An issue with the download of the Leave Situation Report for Department Managers (in the employee portal) has been resolved.
  • Billing
    • Fixed an issue where a new company was being created occasionally when Purchasing Credits.
    • Invoices are now downloadable from the Billing section.
  • SEPA (Files and Bank Details
    • The "Batch SEPA Payments" checkbox now shows as enabled when it is selected.
    • Only Payslips which have been marked as Calculated & Saved will be included in the SEPA file.
  • Others
    • Resolved an issue in which the Weekly Wage in the FS3 was displaying as NaN.
    • Improvements made were made to the Live Chat functionality. Upon the first message, the support team will be notified of which company you are working on, allowing our team to personalise the messages and respond quicker.
    • We updated the logo being used in emails that are sent automatically through Buddy (such as payslips, leave application approvals, etc.)
  • Hotfixes (17th August - 23rd August)
    • An issue with the Answer Bot (Live Chat) has been resolved, and should now suggest more recommendations.
    • When switching between companies, Buddy will now do a full-reloading of all details. This should improve the experience of users who access multiple companies and prevent some rare occurrences.
    • Corrected the Leave Situation Type to show the Leave name of Custom leave types as well.
    • Updated Buddy to refresh all data when switching companies. This should help the performance of multi-user accounts.
    • Resolved an issue with Auto-Pay Public Holiday Leave which was being calculated twice when Processing Timesheets
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