People Manager Release March 2023
- Kelly Collins
We are pleased to confirm the upcoming release of People Manager. This will be available to all users by 3 April 2023.
Listening to our users is important to us. We hope that you find these changes useful and they help in streamlining your business processes. Please contact support if you wish to discuss these functions further or have them switched on for you.
All previous release notes can be found here: Release Notes
Key highlights
Rules - There is new functionality allowing you to create rules and apply them to workflow settings and messages. This allows you even greater control over absence types and communications within People Manager. Please contact support if you cannot see these options with your system.
Knowledge base link - You will now be able to go directly to the knowledge base from People Manager. The knowledge base provides you with helpful information regarding screens and processes.
New features:
Rules: creating rules, applying rules to messages, applying rules to absence types
Improvements:
Entitlement figures for working from home absence
Allow created bonus types to be excluded from payroll submissions
Comment required setting for absence type
Validation for address details
Payroll submission and access to employee personal tab
New features details
Creating rules
We have developed a new feature called rules, this menu option can be found in admin in your top menu bar and within the system section. Using equals/not equals as well as and/or options you can create a rule for a particular group of employees.
For example you may wish to set up a rule for a department. Once you have selected department in the first dropdown, you will then be able to select any departments in the third dropdown.
You can add further rules to this if you wish to specify the location as well as department. For example the rule below applies to anyone in department 002 working at location Ipswich.
By adding groups and further rules, you can create rules that will apply to all employees within a department at a variety of locations. For example the rule is for anyone who works in the department finance and works at the locations Singapore or Australia. Click rules for full details on how to create and edit.
Applying rules to messages
People Manager gives you the ability to send messages either via email or using the dashboard. With the creation of rules you will be able to send a message to a particular group of employees.
Click on admin in your top menu bar and within the system section click on messages.
You will see a rules dropdown option, you can leave this as all people if you do not require a rule to be added, or alternatively using the dropdown select one of the rules you have created. Go to messages for more information on how you can use this function.
Applying rules to absence types
You can restrict an absence type to a group of employees, by applying a workflow rule within workflow settings.
From admin in the top menu bar, select workflow settings in the workflow section. You will see a workflow rule column, using the dropdown you will see all rules that you have created available for selection, by applying a particular rule, only that group of employees will be able to use that absence type. For further information for to workflow settings.
Knowledge base link
We are pleased to announce that you will now have a direct link to our knowledge base from the top menu bar. Within our knowledge base, we have admin, manager and employee sections to help all users. For admins, you will see all the employee tabs and what data they can hold, as well as all the screens within your admin menu, taking you through the set up and editing of functions within the system. For managers and employees there are guides on timesheets, expenses and absences covering both entry and approving. There are useful how to guides showing you details such as; appraisal processes, time off in lieu as well as how to change contract details.
Additional reporting fields
We have added 4 additional reporting fields for organisation approvers. You can use the search bar within reporting to and type in organisation approver. The additional titles are: name, staff number, job title, leaver date. Go to reports to find out more about how People Manager provides you with a selection of prebuilt reports, as well as the ability to build your own.
Improvement details
Entitlement figures for working from home absence
Previously, if you had a work from home absence type set up and entitlements to be shown enabled, this was not showing. This will now work as expected and employees will see their entitlement against that absence type. Absence types can be added within manage lookups and you can use entitlement plans to allocate a set number of days to employees. Who can use this absence and how the workflow is controlled can be set within workflow settings.
Allow created bonus types to be excluded from payroll submissions
If you are using Pay Manager for your payroll, you can now choose to exclude a bonus from your payroll submission. Bonus types are created within manage lookups, when creating a new bonus, you can tick the exclude from payroll box. You will also be able to add a note to this bonus type.
The note detail will be shown within the pay - bonus tab, when selecting this bonus type. Please contact support if you wish to have this function enabled.
Comment required setting for absence type
We have provided an additional column called comment required within workflow settings, giving you the ability to make comment required mandatory against an absence type. The column is a tick box option, simply tick the box against the absence type you wish to make the comment field mandatory. When an employee enters their absence, if they leave the comment field blank, the system will advise that a comment is required and a red line will be marked about the comment box.
Validation for address details
We have added validation to personal - address tab to indicate that the following fields are mandatory: address line 1, then either address line 2, 3 or 4, and post code. With this validation in place, when you try to save an address it will advise that you have missed mandatory fields.
Payroll submission and access to employee personal tab
Previously, admin users with access to payroll submissions, but no access to employees' personal detail tabs received an error when trying to submit payroll. This has now been changed. You can use security access groups to restrict what a group of users have access to, as well as restricting the ability to edit or see particular fields.