September '11 Update

This being only the second post of the year illustrates how busy we have been and how difficult it has been to find time to keep you updated on development here at Carval. I always planned to keep this updated at least once a month and will endeavour to get back to that timeframe.

In the last entry, I mentioned that Carval had been shortlisted for a Small Business of the Year Award. You may have seen it reported back in April that we indeed won that award, a great achievement for the hard work and expertise put in by the Carval team over the past few years, turbulent as they have been for everyone.

At that time, v4.18 had just been released, which contained all the legislative changes for the 2011/12 tax year. Since then, we worked on some internal and structural changes to the software which formed the unreleased v4.19. We are currently in beta testing of v4.20, which will contain, amongst other features:

General

• Mail Merge - now uses the built-in report writer to give much more control over printing, saving and emailing merged documents, and saving them to employees' records. (Microsoft Word mail merge is still supported).
• Report Scheduler - dynamic date selection for report parameters (e.g. show all absence records entered a week ago up to today, where "today" is the date on which the report will run)
• Workflow - set up a flow of tasks to assign to employees, visible to them in HR Unity (Windows) or HR Unity Online (Self Service)
• Employee Information Popup - view vital information about any employee with just a click
• User defined columns on the Employee Search 
• Lookup search now, optionally, allows "obsolete" codes to be seen
• Bank Holiday exceptions by year
• Spinal Column Point "Mid points"

HR

• Company Dashboard - graphs and metrics on the company or companies you have selected
• Driving Licence screens, including Licence Categories.
• Improved security for payroll fields in HR

Payroll

• Data Provisioning Service - ability to run more than one tax reference at a time
• In Year Movements Internet Filing - added to HR Unity Scheduler

Self Service

• Online Payment Requests
• T&A Supervisor functions (such as being able to see and add clockings, make shift changes and add Overtime Authorisation and Worked Meal Breaks)
• View Policies and Forms online

v4.20 is due for release in October.

Work has already started on v4.21, which is the legislative release for the 2012/13 tax year. As well as making the required changes to calculate your payroll correctly, we will also be working on HMRC's new Real-Time Information (RTI) update for payroll. Uniwage has been selected to pilot this scheme for the 2012/13 tax year along with half a dozen of our customers. This will not affect anyone else for the coming year, but it will mean that Uniwage is fully ready for RTI when it goes live for you from April 2013 onwards.

RTI is designed to ultimately replace the Intenret Filing of End of Year (P14, P35) and In Year (P45, P46) forms.

HMRC have also decided to drop the Payroll Standard award that they have created back in 2002. Carval were one of the first payroll software providers to get on board with the Payroll Standard and were involved in early workshops to shape it. We are disappointed that this decision has been taken, as only 55 out of 300 payroll software developers were accredited which meant that Uniwage was part of an elite list of providers who had committed to proving their software has undergone the rigorous testing by HMRC. The Payroll Standard will end on April 2012, at which point we must remove the logo and any reference to it. Rest assured, this does not mean we will not be keeping our software up to the high standard you have come to expect.

Also, you may have heard that Microsoft are planning to release a new version of Windows next year, Windows 8. It is important to us and our customers that our software will continue to work with the very latest Windows, and so Carval have obtained a Developer Preview edition of this operating system. I can confirm that HR Unity installs and works with no problems, as you would expect.