We are excited to announce that early access to our latest Humanforce Cloud rostering and scheduling feature within Roster Manager: Shift Confirmation.

With Australian Fair Work legislation stating that employees have the right “not” to work on a public holiday, organisations can not only ensure shifts are confirmed by employees for compliance purposes, but they can gain greater schedule control, boost operational efficiency, and enhance employee satisfaction.

Shift confirmation is a new feature that can be enabled for you by opting into early access for testing purposes and offers the same functionality as the 'Roster Offer' feature found specifically in Humanforce Back-Office.

To request access, simply submit a support ticket via Humanforce Help to have the feature enabled in Production for your organisation.

Let's dive in...

🔥 What’s New?

Shift confirmation introduces the ability to send out a request for the employee to confirm their acceptance of single or multiple shifts. This ensures employers can ask employees if they would like to work on public holidays.

This functionality will not be restricted to shifts only scheduled on public holidays. Customers will also be able to request confirmation on any shifts they choose.

In terms of the shift allocation process that has been designed to support this, shifts to be assigned to employees and then sent to the employee requesting their consent to work.

Shift Confirmation offers the same functionality as the ‘Roster offer’ feature found specifically in Back-office Humanforce. Back-office users are advised to use Shift Confirmation as a replacement.

⭐️ Why it matters

Shift Confirmation provides benefits for both employers and employees.

Legislative Compliance: The ability for rostering managers to have shifts confirmed by employees assists customers in the compliance of new legislation that requires employees to have the option to decline working on public holidays. Customers who adhere to their legal requirements, reduces the likelihood of incurring potential penalties or reputational damage.

Enhanced Employee Satisfaction: By enabling employees to confirm shifts, it gives them a sense of autonomy and control over their work schedules, leading to increased job satisfaction and potentially reducing turnover rates.

Improved Operational Efficiency: Confirmed shifts help ensure that only willing and available employees are scheduled, reducing the likelihood of last-minute absences and the need for emergency cover, thereby ultimately optimising workforce allocation and reducing operational disruptions.

Fair work legislation states that employees have the right “not” to work on a public holiday.

🏁 Getting Started  

As a reminder, Shift confirmation is a new feature that can be enabled for you by opting into early access for testing purposes.  To request access, simply submit a support ticket via Humanforce Help to have the feature enabled in Production for your organisation.

 For more information on how to utilise this new feature view our Help article.

In this release, we’re excited to bring you early access to Shift confirmation in Roster Manager, more shift alerts/warnings to keep you compliant, and more. Read on for all the details!

All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments will be automatically updated to bring you the items below, overnight on Wednesday 26th June 2024.

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

Shift Confirmation

We are excited to announce early access to our latest Humanforce Cloud rostering and scheduling feature within Roster Manager: Shift confirmation.  

Shift confirmation allows you to easily send a request to your workers via SMS, push notification (or both) and have them confirm their acceptance and availability for working the shift. This can be done for a single shift, multiple shifts, all shifts or all shifts that fall on a public holiday.  

Shift Confirmation offers the same functionality as the ‘Roster offer’ feature found specifically in Back-office Humanforce. Back-office users are advised to use Shift Confirmation as a replacement.

To opt in for early access to Shift Confirmation for your testing purposes, simply submit a support ticket via Humanforce Help to have the feature enabled in Production for your organisation.

For more information on using this feature, visit Shift confirmation in our Using Roster Manager help article.

Location/Department qualification warning

The Employee's Location/Department qualification warning has now been implemented in Roster Manager, so you can see warnings within the roster if an employee does not have the required qualification for the location and department within the shift. To set up or edit this alert visit Admin > System Config > Clock-in Settings.

Template Manager

Management > Rostering > Template Manager

The Employee's Visa warning has now been implemented, so you can make informed decisions about who to include in a template more easily.  When configured in Admin > System Config > Clock-in Settings, you will see warnings within Template Manager if an employee has an expired visa.

Leave Approvals and Read-Only Shifts

Management > Availability > Leave Approvals

The leave approval workflow has been improved to unassign employees from read only shifts, where it clashes with approved leave. Previously, employees assigned to read only shifts were not removed on approval of their leave.

Employee Rostering

Management > Rostering > Employee Rostering

When re-assigning a shift and adding a leave timesheet for an employee, leave timesheets can be auto authorised based on a permission. To activate the new permission:

• Go to Admin > Security Config > Access Levels
• For the relevant Access Level, click Edit and then the Permissions tab.
• Find the new permission under Rostering Screens > Allow editing, called Auto-authorise when adding a leave timesheet as part of reassign workflow.
• Select the checkbox and click Apply Changes.

In this release, we’re excited to bring you more improvements to Roster Manager, Template Manager, Timesheets, and more. Read on for all the details!

All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments will be automatically updated to bring you the items below, overnight on Wednesday 12th June 2024.

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

In Shift view, you can now sort by column in the summary of shifts for any day and role.  By default, shifts are sorted by Start time, earliest to latest. To sort shifts by a different column, click the column heading (and click again to switch between ascending and descending order). 

A new permission, Delete All Shifts, has been added which provides you with control over who can delete all shifts within a roster. To edit this permission, go to Admin > Security Config > Access Levels > Edit and click the Permissions tab.

Template Manager and Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager/Template Manager

We’ve fixed two issues where: 

• If Adding or Editing a shift, the Function drop-down would not allow a selection to be made if the shift already had an Area selected.
• If a shift was created without a break, and later a valid break time was added, an invalid break time message was being displayed.

These issues have been resolved in both Roster Manager and Template Manager.

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets

1. When you authorise a timesheet using the Authorise icon or edit inline the Pay Start or Pay End times for an authorised timesheet, the system now refreshes the Cost field automatically for timesheets in the pay period, for the employee whose timesheet was originally edited. Note that the values may not change, if the edit does not impact Cost. This ensures the Timesheet grid always displays the correct Cost value for the pay period.
   
   
   
   
   
2. When viewing All alerts, and marking an alert as read (by clicking the eye icon), the position of the alert in the list no longer changes. This change brings it into line with the behaviour of the other alert filter options.
3. We have enhanced the accuracy of Status data for authorised timesheets. Now, when you: 
   • use the Start or End time inline editing on an authorised timesheet, and 
   • the Do not unauthorise a timesheet when modified permission is not enabled, 
   • the Status will immediately update to Unauthorised.
     Previously, this update required a manual refresh. Additionally, the timesheet will be removed from the grid if your view excludes Unauthorised timesheets.
4. After a recent change, in certain circumstances, timesheets were not being sorted correctly. This has been resolved.
5. In certain circumstances, when manually entering a Pay End time, a timesheet captured seconds and milliseconds (as well as minutes and hours), causing the Gross and Net value fields to display unrounded values to the millisecond. This has now been changed to provide values in hours and minutes for ease of use.
6. When using New > New Timesheets from Roster, applying filters and choosing Select all, only the filtered and selected records will now be removed when you click the Delete icon.

Department Rostering

We are excited to share with you some of the feature enhancements that we have released in the last month. Additionally, we have an exciting announcement about a new onboarding feature that we have been building to make onboarding your employees a lot simpler and more effective.

IntelliHR sends check-ins, self-assessments, and policy forms to employees via email. Sometimes, team members may inform you that they have not received any email notifications about their tasks. In such cases, the email log becomes valuable for you as a system administrator. It provides an audit trail of all emails sent from intelliHR, including the recipients and timestamps.  

We have enhanced the email log by adding more detailed statuses to help you track the status of emails and understand why they may have failed to send. You can now track email statuses more effectively as we have added new statuses to indicate if the email has been delivered, was marked spam by the user, failed to send due to email address issues, or for other reasons. You can learn about what each status means by clicking on the “About Email Statuses” button on the top right of the page. Understanding why an email notification is not delivered will make it easier for system administrators to quickly rectify the problem. 

For more information on Email Log, click here to access our helpdesk. 

Delegated Access 

All Settings > Delegated Access > Create 

Within the platform, permissions between supervisor and their direct reports control what a user can see or do on a particular employee’s profile. Some businesses may require more than one person to have certain permissions in relation to an employee. intelliHR supports this through delegated access; allowing managers to have visibility over teams with either the same access as their current supervisor or modified access  

We have updated the instructions on the Delegated Access page to make setting up delegated access permissions easier. You can now find more detailed descriptions when creating a delegated access group in your organisation. We hope that these instructions will clarify the process for you. 

Click here to learn more about Delegated Access.

Contracts enhancement 

Organisation > Contracts  

The Contracts dashboard page is now paginated. Pagination means that the contract page will load more quickly because all contracts will be displayed across multiple pages. Each page will now show 10 contracts instead of loading all the contracts on a single page, resulting in faster loading times.

For more information on using Contracts in intelliHR, click here. 

 

Coming Soon: New Onboarding flow 

We have been developing a new onboarding feature designed to prepare your new team members for success even before their first day. In addition to enhancing the employee experience, the new update will help alleviate administrative burdens on your People Team, improve data integrity, and manage compliance more effectively.

Recently, we provided a sneak peek of the new onboarding experience in our intelliHR customer webinar session. If you're a current intelliHR user and would like to activate this feature in your platform before its full release, please reach out to your intelliHR support team. We will be hosting a training session for current customers on how to optimise your onboarding process with the new feature and make the most of your intelliHR platform. This session is intended for System Administrators or those responsible for configuring your intelliHR platform. Click here for more information. 

 

In this release, we’re excited to bring you more improvements to Roster Manager, Timesheets, and more. Read on for all the details!

All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments will be automatically updated to bring you the items below, overnight on Wednesday 29th May 2024.

Reminder: call out for organisations to test and provide feedback on Editing Timesheets in Bulk

We’re keen to hear your feedback on the new Timesheet Bulk Edit feature and how it performs for the needs of your organisation, so it can be as powerful as possible. 

Interested in testing it out? 

We invite you to submit a support ticket via Humanforce Help, to have the feature enabled in Production for your organisation. Spots are limited, so be quick!

If you secure a testing spot, our support team will enable the feature for your organisation, and you will control which of your users have access to Timesheet Bulk Edit, via permissions. For testing purposes, we recommend limiting access to Timesheet Bulk Edit to a small number of experienced users. 

Once you’ve had a chance to test the new feature, send any issues or queries to our support team and/or go ahead and use it more broadly in your organisation.

To learn more about how this new feature works, visit Editing Timesheets in Bulk.

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

We've updated the Role summary modal within Shift view to provide more flexibility over the information displayed.  Some of the new improvements you will see:

• The ability to set what columns are displayed and the order they appear
• Warnings and Errors now consistent with People & Role views
• A new filter to show Unassigned shifts only
• Status icons applicable to the shifts now visible.

You can now filter by Employment type within the Roster.

The Employee's Grade warning has now been implemented.  When configured in Clock In Settings Alerts, you will see warnings within the Roster if an employee does not meed the Grade requirement.

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets

We've made it easier to perform quick 'inline' edits to the Start Time and End Time directly from the main Timesheet table.

For a better user experience and as part of our program to improve consistency, we've reorganised the Alerts and New buttons in the Timesheet header and updated the Screen Settings and Update Roster Times buttons.

We’ve resolved an issue where Reason was not always being populated in the main timesheets grid.

Department Rostering

Management > Rostering > Department Rostering

The workflow to clear employees on leave from rostered shifts will now clear employees only for approved leave requests.  Any employees with pending leave requests or declined leave requests will no longer be removed from the shifts.

Employee Rostering

Management > Rostering > Employee Rostering

When creating a timesheet after reassigning a shift, users with the appropriate permission to authorise the timesheet are now permitted to edit the Authorise checkbox. While the Authorise checkbox will still be automatically ticked when changing the Shift Type to a Leave type, the user will now be able to untick the checkbox to create the timesheet as Unauthorised. Previously this checkbox was disabled for all users. Note that opting to create an unauthorised Leave timesheet will not create a leave request.

Bid Manager

Management > Shift > Bid Manager

Period Hours and Period Hours + Leave data in Bid Manager now include shifts and leave with a start date within the Pay Period of the shift being bid on, regardless of the shift/leave end date. This will better assist managers in determining the correct employee to offer a shift to. Previously any such shifts/leave were being excluded from the calculation.

Workforce Analytics

Management > Advanced > Workforce Analytics

Two new datasources of Location Code and Export Code have been added to the Timesheet Data report to assist with identifying Locations in the report. This is especially useful for those who may frequently need to update the Location name.

The Shift type filter within the Leave request report now includes shift types where the Allow Staff Requests setting is enabled.

Payrun Reports

Management > Timesheets > Payroll > Payrun > Reports

Improvements have been made to all the reports available in payrun screen to view and filter the data prior to exporting to CSV. The report names have been updated to reflect this change and additional menu options are available to either view the data or export the data to CSV. 

Labour Group Allocation

Admin > System Config > Labour Group Allocation

Improvement has been made to Labour group allocation to allow for percentages to have up to 2 digit decimals. 

As Humanforce Payroll Customers are preparing for end of financial year 2024 STP processing, we are happy to announce that a few new changes have been made to help streamline and simplify the exercise for payroll teams.

Let’s dive into the product related update, some important information and the handy support resources available.

🔥What's New?

Most of the routines relating to Year End processing have now been automated so that once you finalise the last pay run of the year, there is nothing more to be done.

 Single Touch Payroll (STP) Processing

The data that gets sent to the ATO via a Pay Event each process is employees’ Year-To Date figures. This has removed a few of the processes within Humanforce Payroll that were previously needed to be done by a Payroll Department at Year End. The major change to the process is that you no longer need to produce a Payment Summary or lodge an empdupe file.

IMPORTANT NOTE: As a safeguard measure, Payroll teams are encouraged to add an additional ‘Special Run’ just before the end of the financial year (i.e. 29th June 2024). This will be Humanforce Payroll customers’ last opportunity to include transaction in the final year. If the final run isn’t needed, there is no harm or loss in having it set up as the run can be performed as a blank run.

Guides

To help with end of financial year 2024 processing the following guides have been constructed.

EOFY Checklist guide - Check off critical items that may be easily overlooked, however are necessary for end of financial year payroll processing. Items such as loading FBT, linking employees to employee numbers, adding a special pay run, reviewing itemised allowances, scheduling month end pay run, and more are covered in our handy check list.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) guide - Want to know if you are set up for STP2 or not, or how to best make corrections after closing off Year End payroll? Or how about how to enter in FBT figures for a terminated employee, or why special a pay run is recommended? Our FAQ guide can give you the clarity you need. 

⭐ Why it matters

End of year STP processing is crucial because it ensures that all employee payroll information, including wages, taxes, and superannuation contributions, is reported accurately and timely to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

This streamlined reporting simplifies compliance, reduces paperwork, and minimises the risk of errors or penalties associated with manual end-of-year reporting processes.

In addition, it enhances transparency for employees by providing them with up-to-date and accessible information about their earnings and deductions, aiding in their personal financial management and tax planning.

🏁 Getting Started  

Humanforce Payroll customers are advised to follow the STP processing instructions that has been communicated to them via email.

For detailed assistance on end of year Humanforce Payroll STP processing, as well as access to the EOFY Check list guide, please access our Help article.

A FAQ guide has also been created to help support and guide Humanforce Payroll customers performing STP end of financial year 2024 processing and is available in this Help article.

If you have any further questions, please reach out to your Humanforce representative.