August 2010 Update

Apologies that there hasn't been a development update for a few months.

In mid-July, the support team identified those customers who would benefit from the changes made to v4.15 and it was shipped. If you didn't receive this release and believe you would like to, contact our support desk. New features and enhancements include:

General

• New Persistent Employee Search. Optionally, if you filter and sort your employee search, you can keep this as your "working list", so that subsequent screens only use these employees until you change your search criteria.
• Significant enhancements to Spinal Column Points, such as improved reporting, more flexible Uplifts and Updates (including the provision to preview the changes before applying them).
• New User password strength and expiry options.
  

HR

• New Fit Notes screen, linking to absences and medical conditions.
• Enhancements to User Defined Screens.
• New ISA screens in preparation for the replacement to CRB.
  

T&A

• New Supervisor Weekly Overtime Authorisation screen. This allows a supervisor to view all the employees who need overtime authorising for a selected week at once, and from there they can amend details as needed and authorise en masse as required.

Work in underway on v4.16, which is scheduled to be on general release in October 2010. Features you can expect to see are:

Uniwage

• New Internet Filing Values Summary now shows before submitting End of Year and Expenses & Benefits submissions, to provide a quick overview of what is being submitted so you can ensure all the correct details are being included in the submission.
  

HR

• New Health Checks and Risk Assessments screens. Health Checks and Risk Assessments can be attached to Posts, and then employees on those Posts can automatically be assigned these as they are added to the Post. New screens for these items are also available per employee, so Health Checks and Risk Assessments can be recorded as they happen, along with a Next Assessment Date for use in the Event Diary.
• New Custom Questionnaires. We added Training Evaluation Questionnaires to the Training module last year, and it has proven such a success, we have now added it as a standard feature to Unistaff HR. Questionnaires can be added for any purpose and grouped by category. Questionnaires are then added to employees, who can be emailed when they are ready to fill in online. Assessors can also be set up to oversee and optionally sign employees' questionnaires.

Self Service

• Improvements to Expenses so that expenses can be added at any time, and sent for approval whenever the employee is ready to send them.

In the meantime, we are gathering the requirements for the statutory payroll release which will be made available as usual in the new year. One feature we will be looking to include is Electronic P60s, now that HMRC regulations have been changed to allow employers to provide P60 information to their employees electronically from the tax year 2010–11 onwards.

Finally, a big thank you to those customers who responded to the newsletter request for testimonials for the Institute of Payroll Professional's (IPP) Payroll / HR Software Provider of the Year Award. It is humbling to hear our users be so positive about our software and support services.