New features and enhancements:

Leave Auto-Approve

Organizations can optionally enable leave types to “auto-approve” (Grant) when an employee or manager creates a leave request.  Any conflicting shifts are either cleared, inactivated, or deleted, per the configuration.  Organizations with Leave Management enabled (Quotas, Limits, etc.) can require that all checks pass when auto-approving.  If a check fails, the leave is still entered as a request.

Employee Unassign Privilege

A new employee privilege allows employees to unassign themselves from shifts.  This setting also has a lead time (buffer time) for the shifts that can be unassigned.  Organizations trying to maximize employee self-service should find this useful as it gives far more control to the employees needing to change their schedule.

Globalize Swaps

Globalized shifts can be swapped across locations.  The existing option required a manager to change a locally posted shift to be globalized.  We have a new setting that automatically treats all shifts on the swapboard as globalized.  Enabling "globalized for all" eliminates the need for manager intervention and cross-location swaps can occur with any shift.

Delete Global Shifts

The global schedule section creates shifts outside of locations that can be worked anywhere.  When a global shift is claimed, the system creates a local shift and inserts it into a local schedule.  The default mode preserves the global shift and the two are linked.  This allows the global shifts to be viewed, monitored, and reported upon separately from local shifts.  However, the global shift link imposes some restrictions on splitting and merging shifts.  To avoid these restrictions, we have a new option to delete the global shift once deployed or claimed.  The shift is now fully local and able to be split/merged/edited with any restrictions. 

Policy by Location

Prior to this release you could have a default policy for all employees and/or have policies assigned to an employee. We now also allow you to assign a policy on location level and employee will pick up a policy from their ‘default location’. This should make it easier for some customers to assign policies for employees without having to handle it on an employee-by-employee basis.  Policies are loaded from most specific to least specific (Employee, Default Location, Global).

Policy Leave Component by Location

We have added Leave as a component types be the assigned on a location. For Shift Differentials and Holiday it’s dependent on the location of a time entry. For Leave the Employees default Location will determine what Leave component should be used in these scenarios. Leave component can be used to manage if the employee can request leave or not (by-passing location settings) and what types of leave an employee can request.

Policy Overtime Component (change)

Adding a configuration setting for how to determine the State rules that are in play. In earlier releases the system would either look at the Employees Address or Employees Default Location Address to determine what State law/rules should be applied. Now we also allow you to configure an Overtime Component to use specific State instead of falling back to check data on the Employee or Location. This makes it easier if you have employees in only one or two states, as you can then configure that State into the overtime component.

Column Filter Improvements

The report column filters, which are saved with the report design, have been implemented to run when fetching the data for the report, rather than as a post processor.  This will increase performance and allow filtering to work with summary reports.