v4.4 and onwards

The technical team recently met to discuss the development plan (or "roadmap" as the kids call it these days) for the next 6-8 months. It begins with the currently developed version, v4.4.0.

v4.4 will contain just short of 70 new features, enhancements and issue resolutions. Not least among the new features will be:

• "Groups" of companies - providing a top-level grouping of one or more companies.
• Absence Allowances - allowing any absence type, not just holidays, to have a limit for the year.
• Analysis of Tax & NI for multi-post employees in different departments and cost centres in the nominal extract and departmental analysis
• Audit Trail report will no longer use run numbers that many of you didn't like - instead we will allow the user to filter by dates and optionally by users, to only show the audit trail items you're looking for (and now in the order they happened, not in table order).

v4.4. will also see some significant speed increases in some areas of the software on larger systems. We have concentrated our efforts on the custom report writer in this version and the result is that both the report designer and the printing of those user-defined reports are now almost instantaneous, whereas we were aware of some significant delays in previous versions. Delays on the payroll calculation screen and the pre-calculation checks in Uniwage have also been tackled.

We are going to pass v4.4 over to the testing team at the end of August and are looking to have it ready for you at the start of October.

In the meantime, v4.5.0 will be the annual statutory release for Uniwage payroll. Not only will we look into the effects of the removal of the 10% tax band, but we are also going to concentrate our efforts on the Expenses & Benefits module. Much of this will be behind-the-scenes design but the overall effect of that will be a speed increase as well as the removal of the limit of 5 cars or loans.

In addition we will be bringing together the vehicles in Expenses & Benefits with those in Unistaff Car Benefits to reduce potential duplication of data. This will be just one part of a more significant series of enhancements under the umbrella of "flexible benefits".

On top of that we have to ensure that the product meets the reaccreditation of the Payroll Standard and that the various internet filing forms are re-recognised for the sixth consecutive year. You may have seen in the newsletter or in certain trade magazines that our error rate in last year's End Of Year filing was 0.07% compared to the national average of 3.8% and we will be adding extra validation to the payroll to try and reduce this further.

There are literally dozens of other enhancements to the product that cannot be discussed at this point until they have been definitively completed - but rest assured that these are designed to improve your experience with the HR Unity software and nearly all of them are as a result of customer feedback. We are listening to you and the next few releases will demonstrate that.