Release Notes Rollup Update 31
November 05, 2020
Overview
Employee Administration
Recruiting
- View and open an applicant's documents directly on the application summary tab
- Improved Transfer of Applicant Information to Employee Profile
- Applicant Rating in Vacancy possible
Training Organization
Leave Management
- Leave for more than one day can be taken hourly
- Offset between positive and negative remaining Leave Entitlements possible
- Overbooking of Leave Entitlements possible
- Carry forward and Roll out of Leave Entitlements is processed via Power Automate
- A correct data entry for the carry forward of Leave Entitlements is ensured
Travel & Expenses
Improvements for IT
- Improved Installer
- Deprecation of Fields
- Goldbright Grids can now be configured to load on the creation of a record
- Technical Change Log
Country Specifics
User Interface Improvements
Solved Tickets
Discover Rollup 31
Employee Administration
Improved Approval Process for Position Planning
A streamlined business process flow is now available for planning and approving new positions. The process consists of 3 stages: "Request", "Approval" and "Availability". In the first stage, the supervisor can enter all necessary data to request a new position, including job profile, start date, approver and budget. The department field will get pre-filled with the department from the job profile. The default status is "Requested". When the information is submitted and the business process flow is set to the stage "Approval", the staffing status is set to "In Approval". Also, the responsible manager gets notified and can either reject or approve the position. When the position was accepted, the staffing status is automatically set to "Recruiting" and proceeded to the next stage. In case the position did not get approved, the record is automatically set to "Inactive" and the staffing status is updated to "Rejected". Furthermore, the status is set automatically based on the respective stage of the position, which still can be changed manually. After approval of the position, the last stage of the business process flow is reached automatically and the status changes to "Recruiting". As soon as the "Employee" field contains a value, the staffing status gets updated to "Filled". In case the employee leaves the position and the field gets empty, the staffing status changes to "Open".
Changed process of One-time payments
One-time payments with a start date before the start of a new employment term are no longer copied when this contract is set to valid. Also, wages with the status reason Draft and a start date set before the start date of new employment terms are not copied to these new employment terms. If the wage starts after the new employment terms, it will be copied as soon as the status reason is Draft. Furthermore, one-time payments remain without an end date.
Recruiting
View and open an applicant's documents directly on the application summary tab
The new Mini Document Viewer makes it much easier to view, compare and manage applications. Incoming documents of an applicant can be opened in a new browser window with one click. Say goodbye to automatic downloads! You always remain GDPR compliant and also increase your comfort significantly: you never have to search for filed CVs, letters of application etc. again and also the comparison of incoming applications is more convenient.
Improved Transfer of Applicant Information to Employee Profile
Once an applicant is hired, the information from the applicant profile is now transferred directly to the employee profile. This improves the efficiency of the hiring process and decreases the error quota. In the tab "Business Data", the "Department" field is already pre-filled from the vacancy the applicant applied and got hired for. As soon as the employee is assigned to a department, a new workflow automatically pre-fills the "Department Head" field. The employee's manager is set to the line manager who gave feedback on the application.
In the "HR Management Details" tab, the employee type field is set to active by default when an employee record is generated. Among others, the "Hired On" and "Hired By" fields as well as e.g. the applicant's Skype ID, his or her country/region get prefilled.
Applicant Rating in Vacancy possible
Applicant Rating is now introduced. This feature allows HR managers to rate their applicants in order to get an overview of the applicant's suitability for a vacancy at first glance. The rank can be assigned through an intuitive five-star ranking system. The top applicants get five stars and therefore, their rank equals 5.
Training Organization
LMS 365 Integration
HR for Dynamics now provides direct integration with LMS365, the learning management platform for Microsoft Office 365. HR for Dynamics allows you to continue managing all your company's trainings (both online and on-site) in one central location. Online courses that you create in the HR system are automatically linked to LMS 365.
Through the employee self-services, participants can access LMS365, where they can find all training courses that are important to them, clearly grouped by category. All training documents can be accessed with just one click.
In LMS365, HR has full control over all training courses and can easily manage participants, details and training contents. Certificates and skills can also be linked to the trainings. In addition to using your own certificates, it is also possible to use pre-designed templates from the e-learning platform. After having passed the training, the participants can simply download the certificate.
Learning has never been so easy!
Leave Management
Leave for more than one day can be taken hourly
Further guidance is provided for the process of requesting leave on an hourly basis with manual entry of hours is enabled. The system prevents entries with wrong data, e. g. when the checkbox "All Day Event" is ticked, no hourly value different from allocated hours of this work day can be entered.
This feature allows for a more precise planning of absence times for the management and increased flexibility for the workforce. Out of the box the respective settings are only set for the absence type "Overtime". However, in the absence type settings, every absence type can be configured to use hours as time unit and for the duration to be entered manually in the leave request.
When a leave request for half a day off is created and saved, by default the "Hours" field shows half of the employee's allocated hours on the specific date (e.g. 4 hours for a working day of 8 hours). The user can modify the duration of the leave request to any amount less than the full 8 hours. In case he enters 9 hours, the system will throw an error reminding the user that it is only possible to enter a duration of min. 0.1 hours to 7.9 hours for a "Half Day Leave Request" in this case.
Offset between positive and negative remaining Leave Entitlements possible
The solution supports offsetting leave entitlements. On creation or update of the leave entitlement's amount or taken value, the system checks if there is a leave entitlement to be offset. Offsetting a leave entitlement means covering negative remaining leave entitlements against positive existing leave entitlements.
For example, if an employee overbooked his leave entitlement and later receives a new leave entitlement, or if a negative remaining entitlement was carried forward to the next fiscal year, the new leave entitlement would first be used to offset the negative entitlement and then the remaining entitlement can be used for requesting leave.
The offset is handled via a new entity "Leave Entitlement Offset" which connects two leave entitlements. The amount on the leave entitlement offset is taken from "Offset From" and given to "Offset To". Leave entitlements which are created to book out a positive remaining entitlement after the end date of a leave entitlement are not offset. In order to ensure this, a flag is used in the background to highlight that it is booked out. Records with a flag set to "Yes" - which is taken as default for the case the field is empty - are neither considered for leave entitlement offset, nor for connecting to a leave allocation. The record is only related to the parent leave entitlement where it is booked out from.
Overbooking of Leave Entitlements possible
A leave entitlement record can no longer be overbooked. In case an employee's leave request is approved exceeding the amount of leave entitlements, the overbooked days will be collected in a dedicated entitlement. This means that a leave allocation is created for a new leave entitlement with the amount of zero for every overbooked leave request. This leave entitlement has the start date equal to the start of the leave request. The automatically created leave entitlement for overbookings is by default valid until the end of the fiscal year and set to "Transfer To New Period" as the process remaining. The "Transfer Until" date (formerly called "Expiry Date") is by default the end of the next fiscal year but can be changed.
Carry forward and Roll out of Leave Entitlements is processed via power automate
To ensure a clear understanding of the options for carrying forward leave entitlements, the "Expiry Date" was renamed to "Transfer Until". This date is only used and can only be filled in case the process remaining is "Transfer To New Period". When selecting "Book Out", any positive remaining leave entitlement is booked out after its end date, i.e. a negative offsetting entitlement with the same amount of days is created. As before, the process remaining "No Action" will not trigger any actions. Though, it is only possible to select this option if the end of the leave entitlement is similar to the end of the fiscal year. However, you are still able to do "Custom Transfers" of leave entitlements by creating or using your own specified behavior.
A correct data entry for the carry forward of Leave Entitlements is ensured
Leave Entitlements can only be created adhering to the correct settings for the Carry Forward process. Incorrect data entries are prevented by the system.
You can find more details and concrete examples about our changes in Leave Management in this Use Case.
Travel & Expenses
Comprehensive Configurations for the per diem calculations
Extended configuration possibilities are available now for the per diem calculation. You can set the distance for allowance to be considered not only for domestic travels but also for domestic and abroad travels. Additionally, you have the following different options to calculate the travel day rate:
- Same as full day: always the full day rate for the selected travel distance is given
- Specific day rate: If the duration is less than 24 hours, per diem is equal to the "Day of Travel or > x h" amount found in "Travel Destination"
- Hourly calculated: calculates only full hours, rounded up with every started hour
- Calculation to the minute: every full minute is taken for the calculation
You can specify the maximum amount of days expenses are generated for. Exceeding this amount of days, no expense will be generated for the following days of travel. The default value is 0, which means that every day of the travel gets considered. More than one travel destination per travel is not supported for this maximum amount of days.
Improvements for IT
Improved Installer
Customers can now select if they want to install the Job Board Support for the German Labor Office (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) or not. Installations without the option will be much quicker as less data has to be installed.
Deprecation of Fields
As previously announced in the Release Notes for Rollup 30, some fields were deprecated. Background workflows have been created in order to copy the data of the deprecated fields to the new fields. These will run automatically when the solution is updated with the Package Deployer but also can be triggered on demand if necessary.
| Entity | Deprecated Fields | New Fields |
|---|---|---|
| Leave Allocation | xrm1_assigned_days | xrm1_assigned |
| Leave Entitlement | xrm1_days_available xrm1_days_taken xrm1_days_remaining xrm1_process_remaining_days |
xrm1_entitlement xrm1_taken xrm1_remaining xrm1_process_remaining |
| Leave Summary | xrm1_days_taken xrm1_days_remaining |
xrm1_taken xrm1_remaining |
The deprecated fields will be maintained in the background as a fallback. With a later following release, the fields will be removed completely. It is recommended to update to the current Rollup 31, so you have the right fields on the user interface. Please ensure that your customizations also use the new fields.
Goldbright Grids can now be configured to load on the creation of a record
Goldbright Grids can now be configured to load on the creation of a record, e.g. a leave request. The user can immediately view the contents of the grid and does not have to save the record first. A new configuration parameter was added to the web resources of Goldbright components called "LoadOnCreate". By default this is set to false for backwards compatibility. When it is set to true, then the Goldbright component will load on create.
Technical Change Log
Detailed information can also be found in our Release Notes and our Technical Change Log
The Plugin Handbook for Rollup 31 can be found here.
Country specifics
Public holidays for all cantons in Switzerland are now available
Good news for our HR friends in Switzerland: From now on all official Swiss holidays are automatically included in the calendar in HR for Dynamics.
Our HR solution now offers different calendars for the different cantons. You never have to enter individual holidays again and can use the integration immediately. The calculation of leave, sick days and remaining leave can now be fully automated. Now, doesn't that put you in a festive mood?
User Interface Improvements
Improvements of the User Interface
We are constantly trying to improve HR for Dynamics and are very happy that with Rollup 31 we were able to implement a lot of improvements in our user interface. Our goal was to make important information even more easy for you to access, especially in frequently used areas of the solution.
All relevant information is therefore now available at a glance. In addition, you can navigate through the solution even more intuitively. This makes it easier and more comfortable for you to use. But just see for yourself...!
Solved Tickets
Solved Customer Tickets
- Security permissions for time & attendance employees are adjusted (CAS-15011-S3X3S)
- All currency fields are set to have 2 digit places by default (CAS-16674-M2K1H)
- Audit history is enabled for applicants (CAS-16670-J2X5W)
- All job translations for vacancies have the same template (CAS-16480-T6L9Q)
- Guidance is provided for the process of requesting leave on an hourly basis (CAS-16037-V9R7H)
- Payments get generated for hourly payments (CAS-15254-S0Z4X)
- Attendance details cannot be created for the future (CAS-16772-L8R8W)
- Flow for rolling out daily summaries sets correct employee reference (CAS-16808-B1X3X)
- Absence type removed from approval mail for leave request (CAS-16250-X7D8W)
- Security permissions for supervisor are adjusted regarding time & attendance entities (CAS-16413-W8V8S)
Discover Rollup 31
Rollup 31.2 und 31.3
Contact
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