Buddy Release: New 2023 Rules and Further Improvements (1st Jan 2023)

Release Summary

Just before the new year, Buddy is shaking things up! Our team at Buddy is incredibly keen on ensuring compliance, and in a push for even higher accuracy, the leave entitlement system is being updated from 2023 onwards.

Moreover, we are introducing changes to the billing system, as we previously communicated via email and blog post: Pricing Update Jan 2023.

With these changes, we are also including further improvements, including a new feature of adding custom notes in payslips, as well as fixes pertaining to our most recent updates. This will ensure that our users get the best user experience when using Buddy.

New 2023 Changes

Vacation Leave Entitlements

One of the key changes coming to 2023 is how Buddy calculates Vacation Leave Entitlement. Leave Entitlement is now defaulted to 192 hours, in addition to the Public Holidays that will be added on the basis of employees' working days and working hours.
If we were to take 2022 into account, most employees would still have had a baseline of 224 hours (e.g. Mon-Fri employees). We'll be making further changes to the calculation of pro-rata on engagement and termination in our next update.

Please ensure that you have downloaded any relevant reports and processed the carryover by Friday the 13th of January, 2023.

For more information, please read through our full announcement: Changes to Leave Entitlement Calculations

Billing Changes

Buddy is now moving away from pre-paid bundles of credits and into a pay monthly model with three standard plans available (see: 2023 Pricing Plans). Most of our existing clients will be placed on the Business Plan, which remains at the same base pricing as our previous credit system. 

The biggest difference is how and when we charge for payments. The addition of new companies will no longer require a pre-purchase of credits. Once per month, we will charge a payment based on the number of Active Employees, rather than payslips issued. This should be a positive change for most, particularly those who generated more payroll more frequently than once a month.

Any credits that were purchased before 2023 will be transferred and used within the new model. Once these credits are utilised, only then will new subscription charges be made. 

Annual Payroll Changes

We have also updated the rates for SSC, MFC, Sickness and Injury Benefits. For a list of the annual changes, see: Annual Payroll Changes as of 1st January 2023

Further Fixes and Improvements

In our last update, Buddy continued to add improvements to the user experience and enhance the Quality of Life of our users. These changes have run smoothly for most clients, however, there were some minor issues experienced in specific circumstances. This update touches up on those issues by introducing fixes and improvements.

Due to the impact on our users, some of these changes were uploaded prior to the release date.

Leave Management

• Fix: Fixed an issue which prevented some users from applying for leave
• Fix: Clicking Save Leave multiple times will no longer create multiple instances of the same leave entry
• Fix: Fixed an issue where no leave types were loading in some companies
• Fix: Fixed an issue where approving or denying a leave entry too quickly was causing an error
• Update: Renamed the leave setting "Can Apply if Balance Available" to"Can Apply Only If Balance Available" for improved clarity
• Fix: Fixed an issue where adding multi-day leave after switching companies would not automate the daily hours in the leave entry.
• Fix: Fixed an issue where the two new leave settings, "Default Public Holiday Hours" and "Do Not Auto Add Public Holiday Leave for Worked Days", were not being saved. 
• Fix: Fixed an issue which was not showing the Leave Timeline for 2023 when accessing it during December

Employee Details

• New: While adding or continuing on adding a new employee profile, you can now go back and forth with ease!
  
• Fix: Fixed an issue where clients using Deputy could not link Buddy employees to their Deputy account
• Fix: Fixed an issue where certain clients could not change an employee's employment type
• Fix: Fixed an issue where employees with the "Other" Employment Type were shown as "External Contractors" instead.
• Fix: Fixed an issue where COLA was not being calculated pro-rata for employees working fixed hours that are not 40 hours per week.

Run Payroll

• New: Can now add custom notes in payslips, see: Writing a Custom Note in Payslip.
• Fix: Fixed an issue where a payroll could not be concluded when employees had missing marriage details
• Fix: Fixed an issue where users could not re-open 2022 payrolls if they have not yet applied COLA for 2023

Payroll History

• Fix: Fixed an issue where users could click refresh on the same payroll period multiple times while the original request was still processing, which was indirectly causing an error.
• Update: Clicking Refresh Payroll Reports will now cause the icon to animate (spin) until the reports are generated.

AccuPay™ (Process Timesheets)

In our latest update, we have added advanced settings and improved our AccuPay™ rule engine. Most of the following fixes would not have impacted long-standing clients, but due to the arisen need from new and future customers, we continue to update and tackle any edge cases. 

• Fix: Fixed an issue which prevented Process Timesheets from loading for a particular department due to a public holiday leave setting. 
• Fix: Fixed issue where Mixed Salaries spanning two cut-off periods were paying overtime using the current salary rates, rather than the previous ones.
• Fix: Fixed an issue with Mixed Salaries spanning two cut-off periods for full-timers where the basic hours were split rather than paying 173.33 hours on the full-time period
• Fix: Fixed the Time & Attendance setting Basic Hours per Week to only calculate Basic Hours, rather than total hours.
• Update: The option "Do Not Auto Add Public Holiday Leave for Worked Days" will now consider unpaid leave applications as worked days for the purpose of skipping entering a new leave application.
• Fix: Fixed an interaction of Mixed Salaries with the Advanced Overtime Setting "Deduct Sunday From Basic". These overtime hours will always deduct Base Hours from the same rate in which they occurred. 
• Fix: Fixed an issue with non-resident tax employees in which two tax entries were created in one payslip. If any payslip had multiple non-resident tax entries, this would have been corrected automatically in the following payslip's tax calculation.
• Fix: Fixed a custom setting which automates the period hours into the Base Hours to include the public holiday hours. This setting will become public upon further testing with a beta client. 

Import Employees

A new year often brings new companies into Buddy. We hope that our existing accountants are saving enough time using Buddy that they can focus on growth and onboarding new clients. With this in mind, we have made several improvements to the Import Employees function