2020 is finally behind us and while it was one challenging year, we hope the new year found you well.

We wish that 2021 will be a better year for everyone!

To kick it off, here's what we've already released for you, so far:

​For web:

​For the Planday app:
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To support hierarchical structures for organizations, with manager roles on different levels, we've improved the way you can manage Department access permissions in Planday.

Previously, any manager with edit rights for Department access permissions within a security group could change or edit Department access for all members of said security group, independent of hierarchy or security group ranking.

You can read more about permissions in this article.

With this update, managers will need a permission level equal to or higher than that of their employees or other managers within a given group, to be able to modify Department access for them.

If you're in doubt about the hierarchy of permission levels or want to make sure that it aligns with the structure within your organization, please reach out to our support team (from the chat icon, in the bottom right corner).
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As a reminder, with the right Permission level, you can edit or grant Department access from People > Employees > open Quick-edit view for the Employee you want to edit Permissions for, by clicking on their name on the list. In the quick-edit view, where you'll find a Permission section. Here, you can add or edit existing permissions for that employee.

If your organization is using the Skills feature, scheduling for a particular skill just got a little faster.

You can read more about Skills in this article.

To make it easier for you and your Schedule managers to get a clear overview of your employees with a specific skill and of the scheduled shifts requiring a specific skill, you can simply toggle on the skills you're looking for, in the Skills section of your Schedule Filters.

As a reminder, the Filters can be found on your Schedule page, in the top left corner (available for all views).

Through the Skills filter, you also choose whether to show both shifts and employees with the selected skills or only employees with selected skills (and all their shifts).

This month brings another series of updates to the Accrued vacation feature, part of the Vacation module, including:

1. added support for History Log on Absence requests
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The new history log will show a list of all the changes made to a vacation request from the moment it was created.

Every entry will have information about who made the change, when, what the change was (whether it was approved, denied, or simply edited), and the message attached to the change (if any).

​2. added support for defining requirements for calculating vacation accruals.
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You can now choose whether the accrual within Accrued Vacation accounts takes into account a certain number of worked & approved Shifts for your employees, or whether the accrual happens automatically regardless of that employee's Shifts.

Please note that the option to configure the accrual requirements is available for accounts that do not rely on a percentage based accruing rate.

This can be particularly useful for organizations that have salaried employees on staff and don't use Shifts within the Schedule.

You can edit your existing Accrued vacation accounts or create new ones with specified requirements from Settings > Absence, Overtime, Vacation.

3. added support for Supervisor filter on the requests page

The Absence Requests page now has an additional filter, to help you find and handle requests faster.

The latest addition to the filter list allows you to show the requests from employees with a particular Supervisor.

If you not already using the Supervisor feature for your staff, but would find it useful, know that you can find it and set it under People > Employee > Edit Employee details, at the bottom of the Details tab (if it's not visible to you, it might be because it needs to be configured first, from Settings > People > Employee form setup or because you might not have the right permission for this).

Please keep in mind that you can always reach out to our support team for assistance (from the chat icon in the bottom right corner of the page).

4. improved Carryover functionality

The functionality embedded in the Accrued Vacation accounts for the carryover of unspent vacation balance, is now automated.

This update will save you time by automatically creating an appropriate account, and setting the balance and the spending period end date for the employees who have
any vacation balance left, at the end of the vacation year.

In order to maintain consistency across Planday, in terms of Department restrictions, Schedule statistics and Shift type statistics reports will now reflect the restrictions of the user generating them.

You can read more about reporting in Planday, in this article.

This means that admins or managers who can view only a limited number of departments, will also only be able to generate reports for employees within the departments they manage.

Please note that the department restriction is applied when gathering data for employees, not shifts. This means that, if an employee has Shifts within multiple departments, the report will contain all the shifts for that employee, including the ones from the otherwise restricted departments.

It is also important to note that after this change, deactivated employees will also be excluded from the restricted reports, as they no longer belong to any departments. Only a manager or admin with all-department access will be able to generate reports that include deactivated employees.

We've recently added the Sage50 employee export format to the employee export feature. This allows you to configure and enable a Sage50 employee export template and save reports, as needed, from People > Employees > Tools > Export data.
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To use this format, you'll need to enable and configure them in the Sage50 Integration editor, from Settings > Integrations > Overview > Sage50, using this step by step guide, to make sure that everything will run smoothly.

Make sure to use the latest versions available for Android (6.14.0) or iOS (6.14.0).

The most recent update for the Planday app brings you: