Buddy Release: A More Intuitive Buddy (28th September 2022)

Summary

This week, Buddy launches yet another release! These changes aim at improving the User Experience in multiple ways: preventing user mistakes, making the Buddy experience more intuitive, and facilitating more flexibility in the way users make use of Buddy. We particularly want to highlight improvements made to the Audit Logs in the employee details.

Release Notes

• Employee Details
  • Tax Rate is now required when adding new employees to prevent instances where users forget to add the Tax Rate at later stages.
  • When disabling the Pay By Bank Transfer option, Buddy will no longer default the visual values to "False". The bank details were still saved, and now users will be able to see the bank details even when employees are not paid via bank transfer. 
  • Buddy has added additional detailed Audit Logs; such as changes to Salary Allowances. Along with the previous update, the re-haul of Audit Logs gives users richer information, allowing you to audit better and see who made the changes, when these were made and what the changes were.
    
  • Following the release, Buddy released a hotfix which was not allowing users to save personal details due to how the address was being stored in Audit Logs.

• Run Payroll and Process Timesheets
  • The way Auto-Pay Public Holiday interacts with Process Timesheets has been revisited to ensure a seamless effect on a set of Time & Attendance Rules. This particularly impacts those employees whose Public Holiday made the difference in whether they are included as Under Hours or paid Overtime. 
  • When Processing Timesheets, employees who were engaged on the first day of the Pay Period will no longer be treated as 'new employees' and will be processed with the same rules as other employees who worked the full period.
  • Changing Sickness Benefit Rate to Not Applicable will no longer cause issues with saving payslips. This change will allow users to remove existing automated sickness benefits at single or married rates by working on non-automated benefit rates

• Leave Management and Settings
  
  • Leave Balances can now be filtered by Departments. This was an intended feature that was not yet working. For companies with a larger amount of employees, viewing balances per department is necessary to fit them into the page without requiring to scroll too much.
  • If you have enabled employees to view the Leave Balance of leave types which have no pre-set entitlement (such as Unpaid), the employee portal will no longer fail to load. This was an oversight as it was not anticipated that users would show such balances in the employee portal.
    
    
• Support Changes
  
  • When entering a new Live Chat, the automated messages notifying our support team on which company you are working on are now limited to one message. This prevents the list of active companies that were previously showing, which was impacting our customer's experience when getting in touch with our support team.
  • Our articles on Zendesk regarding Buddy's Rulebook and the User Guide have been translated to English (Maltese). If you have any articles bookmarked, please ensure the link reflects the language EN-MT. This can also be done from the bottom of each article as per the below screenshot. For more information, see: How to view the relevant article based on the Country?
  • We will also take this opportunity to highlight our team's new article: When to Contact Buddy's Support Team. Recently, we noticed an increase in requests/queries that are out of the scope of our service. Although we appreciate the trust you put in our team, we would like to remind our customers that for queries regarding legal advice, please contact your accountants or official authorities, such as the MTCA and DIER.
    
    

• Company Settings
  • When adding a New Company, clicking Go to New Company will now automatically close the pop-up box, making the start of new company accounts smoother. 
  • After adding multiple Pay Schedules within a company, the People page will now indicate if any employee has not been assigned to a Pay Schedule.
    
    

• Payroll History
  • The screen after payroll has been concluded has been revamped with a new layout, icons and more buttons, such as the Download SEPA File.  
  • For companies with old payrolls, accessing Payroll History will no longer return a blank screen. Our Support Team had already resolved this for any clients who reported this issue, but now this is applicable to all companies.
  • Along with this is a minor update for the sorting of Payroll History to ensure that old payrolls with fewer data obey the sorting rules that were put in place in the previous releases.

• Integrations
  
  • The Deputy integration has been improved in the way it syncs the leave balances between the two systems; particularly in the instances of unapproving and re-approving the same timesheets.