October '08 Update

Version 4.7

Version v4.7 has been released and you should already have received your CD. If you have not and you wish to have it then please contact Carval's support team.

User Group Meeting

One of our customers, Dartington Hall, have kindly organised a South West User Group Meeting for Tuesday 28th October here in Devon. Myself and Technical Director Chris Sweby will be attending, and are both giving presentations, as well as being there to answer feedback from those users attending.

I will post details of this meeting at a later date but I am looking forward to meeting some of our customers and hearing what they have to say. If anyone is interested in the idea of organising a User Group Meeting local to them then we would love to hear from you.

Upcoming versions

Version 4.8 is currently under development and contains some great new features. These include:

• General: The ability to customise the terminology on every screen so that it suits your organisation better (e.g. have "Department" renamed to "Division" on every screen in the system).
• Unitend: Shift Swapping (between 2 employees) and Global Shift Changes (for a group of employees) now standard throughout Unitend T&A.
• Unitend: Skills from Unistaff HR are now available in T&A.
• Unitend/Unistaff: Perform a Skills Search to see who can cover an employee who is away.

Version 4.9 will be the annual payroll release and so will be dictated by changes to payroll for tax year 2009/10. Part of this process is the annual renewal of the HMRC Payroll Standard plus re-recognition of forms for you to file online. And look out for more forms being made available for you to file!

One last thing: from April 2009, it will mandatory for companies over 50 employees to file P45/P46 online, as it is now with P14/P35 End of Year. You don't need to worry as Uniwage Payroll already provides this (and has done since P45/P46 Filing was instigated). Furthermore, they will now require a digital signature from April '09, and Uniwage already provides this from v4.7. Over 60% of payroll vendors with the Payroll Standard don't have this ability yet so you're already ahead of the game.