Release Notes are prepared by the Support Team each month, with the Australian and New Zealand versions being uploaded to their respective DataHelp sites.

2024 Release Notes:

September Summary

New Functionality

• Leave Priority Matching
  Changes have been made to how Leave Priorities work within Datapay. Going forward a Leave Request will only look to match with the leave in the first position of a Leave Priority, and will not consider the leave types between the first and last positions when determining if the Leave Priority should apply. Previously the leave taken would look to match with the leave type in any of the positions other than last.

• Multiple Leave Priorities
  Due to the above change, leave types can now be used in multiple Leave Priorities where before they could only be used in one. Each leave type can only be used in the first position once however, as this position will determine if there is a leave priority in place for that leave type.

• Special Leave
  Special Leave has been renamed to Ordinary Pay
  
  

August Summary

Fixes

• Flare HR
  Saving company information against a multicompany is no longer failing.

• General Ledger
  An issue has been resolved where General Ledger reports could contain duplicate or missing rows, when cost percentage of components exist.

• Employee Import
  In some scenarios importing an employee could cause two Main pay packets could be created.

• Employee Import
  Validation of the tenure effective date has been improved when importing new employees.

• Print Double Sided Payslips
  The company option to Print Double Sided Payslips has been removed. This feature is no longer required, as printing payslips is no longer offered.

• API Error Message
  Updated the error message to be displayed in the body of the response.

• Company Organisation Structure
  A scenario where the relationship gets modified for an employee after the employee's termination date, potentially causing the employee to be orphaned in the ESS Company employee screen has been corrected.

• Payslip API
  When retrieving an employee payslip via API, if the pay packet in question did not produce a payslip the error code returned will now be “204-No Content”

New Functionality

• Humanforce
  The ‘Daily Hours’ component has been introduced to support calculations for integration with Humanforce.

• API Error Improvements
  Improved the response code when an employee is finalised via the API and start date is in a future pay period.
  
  

July Summary

New Functionality

• Bamboo HR - Successful sync notification email
  Introducing new notification emails for successful sync and for sync with no changes.

Australia Specific

• Employee STP information are now available in the report builder
  The STP Income Stream Country and STP Income Stream Type fields are now available in the report builder and can be included in a custom report

Fixes

• Fixed the CSV Departmental Cost Report
  When there are multiple timesheet entries, the issue of duplicated roles is resolved and no longer display on the report

June Summary

No release notes for June 2024

May Summary

New Functionality

• Bulk import employee superannuation details
  Datapay can bulk import employee superannuation details. If existing superannuation details are present, the imported value will end-date the old value in the employee superannuation details screen.

Australia Specific

• Provide more specific details regarding the STP failure message - Column ‘LocalityNameT’ does not allow nulls
  The message is now display as ‘Incomplete Setup - Income Stream is incomplete at Employee level. Make sure description is filled in correctly for employee name (employee code)’

• The STP failure message is now included in the standard Error and Warnings report
  A new warning will be displayed in the Errors & Warnings report if the STP fails due to a missing suburb in an employee's setup.

Fixes

• Resolved the display issue of the leave balance when employees were terminated and had an anniversary date within the same period
  Occasionally, there was a display issue on the leave summary screen after an employee was terminated. This issue has now been fixed.

• Fixed the issue that prevented the creation of pay packets for new employees when a custom holiday was setup at the company level in the same pay period as their start date
  The issue caused by the work pattern of the new employee, which was linked to the creation of a new custom holiday. This issue has been resolved.

April Summary

Fixes

• Fix the issue of erroneously generated Remuneration Change Queue records for certain employees
  Review and develop a new solution for the Remuneration Change Queue criteria to minimize unnecessary server processing and enhance system performance.

• Fix Datapay access issue for non-admin/global users with Company Report Builder and Read Only Payroll Officer roles
  Previously, these users encountered an “Access Denied“ error message upon logging in Datapay application. Now, users can login successfully without encountering any issues.

• The “Access Denied“ error message will no longer appear when a Read Only Payroll Officer clicks on the Company Tab
  Users with roles such as Read Only Payroll Officer or equivalent will no longer encounter the “Access Denied“ error when attempting to access the Company Tab, as long as the users have permission to view company information.

March Summary

Fixes

• Enhanced the validation process for bank account information during bulk import - Third Party Extract
  Previously, when multiple bank account changes were included in the import file, the system only recognized the first changes and encountered errors with subsequent changes. Now, all changes are correctly reflected in the system.

• Improve the validation of employee code when importing CSV file - Third Party Integration via SFTP
  When clients establish an SFTP location to import new employee/update existing employee data, the system will now disregard the case sensitivity of employee code during the CSV file import validation process.

February Summary

New Functionality

• MyPay app enhancement: view Reversal and Adjustment payslips
  Previously, employees could only view reversal and adjustment payslips in Direct Access. Now, they have the convenience of accessing these payslips directly through the MyPay app.

Fixes

• Copy company functionality works for the cross company
  When copying a cross company, error would occur previously, particularly with organization structures. This functionality has been resolved. and it operates the same as copying a single company. The organization structure will remain separate.

January Summary

Fixes

• Bamboo HR - Update Bamboo HR error handing for leave synchronization
  An update has been implemented to Bamboo HR's error handling mechanism for leave request sync. Notably, there will no longer be an error message generated when attempting to sync an existing leave request that has been processed in Datapay, provided there are no actual changes such as name, hours, or comments.

2023 Release Notes:

December Summary

New Functionality

• Display the occupation on the Payslip
  A new field for occupation has been incorporated into the payslip options. Companies now have the choice to display the occupation on the payslip if desired.

• Enable/disable the “Add Cost Centre” feature in Direct Access Timesheet
  Admin users now have the ability to enable/disable the "Add Cost Centre" feature in Direct Access Timesheet. When this feature is disabled, the "Add Cost Centre" button will no longer be visible on the timesheet.

November Summary

New Functionality

• Bamboo HR

  Enhanced the error message “Cannot parse the free text“ to provide more specific employee and data information, thus helping to identify the root cause of the issue more effectively.

October Summary

Fixes

• Mid Period Terminations
  When an employee is terminated mid period, their open pay packet will now automatically merge so that it covers the correct dates.

• MFA Password Resets
  An issue preventing employees from being able to save a new password in Direct Access has been resolved.

New Functionality

• CUSTOM23920 Report Improvement
  The ability to report on current and future referenced pay rates including their effective dates has been added to the CUSTOM23920 report.

• BambooHR
  A new notification has been set up to alert users in the event a Leave Policy has not been set up in BambooHR when attempting to sync leave balances into Datapay.

• BambooHR
  Support for a ‘Bank Account Holder Name’ field has been added, so that users can enter this information into BambooHR instead of needing to add it to Datapay manually.

September Summary

Fixes

• Timesheet Import API
  Clarity of the error messages and formatting in the notification email have been improved.

• BambooHR Integration - Costing
  Changes have been made to account for historical costing data against employees which Datapay can’t accept as it doesn’t match with the employee record. Users should no longer receive the error “Start Date must be equal or after the first Tenure Start Date” for these employees.

• BambooHR Integration - Compensation
  Changes have been made to ignore all historical compensation values in BambooHR that are effective before the Datapay Start Date to prevent errors when attempting to save this information in Datapay.

• BambooHR - Leave Requests
  Leave Requests were failing to sync with Datapay where the Leave Request Comment was over 255 characters.

• BambooHR - Employee Agreement
  Changing or setting the End Date of an employment agreement in Bamboo HR was not registered as a change within Datapay. This data will now flow through as expected.

• General Ledger
  In specific situations an issue with how Datapay handled Cost Allocations could cause the General Ledger to fail.

August Summary

Fixes

• Removing company components did not delete data completely
  The deletion of company components now ensures that all data related to the component is now deleted

• BambooHR Set up - Duplicate Employee Group Error Message
  BambooHR API Integration: Improved error message for duplicate employee group.

• Pay packet automatically created upon import when using csv file
  When importing a CSV new employee import file with multiple new employees, employee pay packets are automatically created in main pay run.

July Summary

Australia Specific

• Automatically retry STP job pull requests for certain OZEDI return codes
  When the STP submission to ATO fails for a particular reason (code 7), it was sitting with status 'Sent to ATO' in our system. Going forward we will automatically resend the STP reports to ATO again.

• Performance Enhancement - Transfer Company Components
  Performance enhancement for editing company component attributes

Fixes

• Historic leave earning period end dates not aligned with pay group's first pay period date
  Change to align the Historic leave earning period end dates with the pay group's first pay period date.

• End Dated Users should not be seen in report wizard
  Change made to remove End Dated Users from the report wizard.

• SmartPayroll Cannot Create New Employee
  This was a bug specific to SmartPayroll environment where there were not able to create new employees in the thin client after the release of the LSL rule template work. The issue has now been fixed.

• BambooHR - Multiple Sync Happening for some fields when there were no changes
  BambooHR Integration: The sync should not send updates for unchanged values from BambooHR

• CSV Employee Details update - error "object reference not set to an instance of an object."
  CSV Integration - When importing multiple new employees with assigned manager via the CSV integration tool, this now correctly assigns employees to their managers.

• Add Costing Assumption in the "Import a Timesheet" API
  API - Updated the "import a timesheet" API to automatically assume the employee's home costing when importing timesheet values without costing assignments.

• API returns Employee Group Start Date instead of Employee's assignment Start Date
  API - Updated the Retrieve an employee's details by ID API call to produce an employee's pay condition employee group assignment effective start date for both the standard hours per week and the standard days per week date values.

June Summary

Australia Specific

• New CBA bank file that merges multiple transactions to a single transaction row (PayGroup)
  A new banking option called 'Commonwealth Bank of Australia (NetBank)' has been created in Datapay and for this bank file if there multiple transactions in the pay run going to the same bank account number, the values will be added and come up as one row in the bank file.

• VIC Payroll Tax Changes effective 1st July 2023
  Victoria payroll tax changes for FY 24 has been implemented.

• WA Payroll Tax Changes effective 1st July 2023
  Western Australia payroll tax changes for FY 24 has been implemented.

Fixes

• Bulk Change could end date country scope buckets
  This was when End Existing Value option is ticked and if the current value comes from country scope, that country scope bucket was ended wrongly

• STP1 report could report Lump Sum A type but with 0 Lump Sum A value due to rounding issue
  Bug fix to ensure where there are no Lump Sum values processed STP EE report should not generate any data against Payee Lump Sum Payment Type & Payee Lump Sum Payment A

• The Exclude PAYEI Deduction From Banking option needs to be enabled for DC dates in the past
  Exclude PAYEI Deduction From Banking option enabled for DC dates in the past

• Annual Leave taken unit in payslips
  Solving an issue when selecting multiple payslip for comparison, History always shows AL taken in hours when comparing multiple pay slips. It is now matching to the unit leave is set to.

• HOH employee can be deleted by accident
  A bug where HOH employee can be deleted by accident, that was introduced by a previous feature for deleting employees with no history.

• STP Update Job does not create via preview reports if the dataset is large
  Enhancement to ensure that the STP reports can be generated off the screen, regardless of the size of the client data.

• Bulk changes throwing error when any employee exists without an employee pay group link
  Solving an issue where Bulk changes throwing error when any employee exists without an employee pay group link.

• Humanforce (API Validation) - the validation didn't cater for composite components
  Import Timesheet API validation improved for composite components.

• Prevent companies from converting to position structure if they are the only company in their company group
  Adding the check to prevent companies from converting to position structure if they are the only company in their company group.

• Child support component display issue under CSV STP employee report
  Bug fix to ensure that Child support component and its clone components (such as child support 1, child support 2 etc) show up on both the Employee and Employer STP reports.

May Summary

Australia Specific

• Add LSL Validation message for LSL import
  When importing LSL balance, an additional validation message will appear to state the missing information if all three columns (entitlement, accrual and taken) are blank. This prevents user from importing the file.

• Able to import LSL onboarding balances
  It’s able to import LSL balances for new employees with no pay packets processed.

Fixes

• Fixing the issue where admin users weren’t able to save the changes under company options
  When a company user with admin roles attempt to make changes under company option screen The changes can be saved.

• Employee Import & Costing
  When an employee was imported/updated via either CSV or API there will be no additional costing line created when there was no change to the employee costing.

• BambooHR API Errors
  The Employee API error message will now include the field type/name which holds the invalid data to aid with troubleshooting.

• Humanforce API Errors
  The Timesheet API error message will now include the specific employees which relate to the error.

• API Bad Data Errors
  In the event of bad data being submitted via the Import Employee API it was returning the wrong error code. This has been updated from a 500 error to a 400 error.

• API Assigning Work Patterns
  When an API assigns a Work Pattern to an employee, the previous Employee Group could end up with the value of “NA” as the End Date if both Work Patterns have the same start date.

April Summary

Fixes

• Termination payment amount calculation for reinstated employees.
  Employees who were terminated and then reinstated in the same pay period. This was caused some calculations after reinstatement to incorrectly include data from the termination pay packet.

March Summary

Australia Specific

• CSV STP Employer reports
  CSV STP Employer reports now render properly for multicompany setups

• Direct Access implement new password logic for report password change
  Report distributions with non-pdf files can be generated if the recipient's password contains a space or "

Fixes

• Multiple Lump Sum E rows can be pass validation
  Can have multiple Lump Sum E rows for different financial years.

• Finalize payrun with Lump Sum E
  Payrun can success finalized when reverse and adjust pay packet with Lump Sum E.

• Payslip message pull through in payslip report
  Payslip messages can be taken from both Pay Component and Component Setup screen.

February Summary

Australia Specific

• Pay group scope users now with ability to add non-employee users under the reporting tab
  Allow pay group scope users to add non-employee users under the reporting tab.

• Ability to add columns for export validation error messages (CSV)
  Error messages exported in CSV to be meaningful with the ability to filter

• Add pay run validation to leave import for importing into open pay run
  Users should not be able to import CSV leave import file into an open pay run. 

• Add display validation error when there are extra column(s) in the csv import file
  Throw an error when there are extra column(s) in the import file

• Effective as at date for initial import to show day before 1st pay period
  Pay Period Ending date specified in the csv import file showing in the Effective as at date of the employee's Leave Summary screen

• Editing Component values will remain the same
  When editing a component, all values that are defined in the existing component should remain

• Bulk Generate STP Cleanse Report for Bureaus
  Bureau user can generate single report per company and have the file drop into a sftp file.

• QLD Payroll Tax Mental Health Wellbeing Levy
  Surcharge amount will be displayed on both the pay packet view and payroll tax report to allow user to reconcile, report and adequate maintain provisions for payroll tax liability.

Fixes

• Import validation error duplicates when employee code is invalid
  Removed duplicate error messages for invalid employee codes and invalid PPE end date.

• STP2 Employee Details Report generate for Bureau company
  when bureau user generates STP2 Employee Details Report with bureau name ticked as null, it will generate report only for the current opened company

• Report failed to generate if password contains invalid characters
  Updated the password validation to not allow quotation marks or spaces, an error will be prompted in the password screen if the user tries.

• Earn-Take (Irregular) in Leave Summary screen to reflect PPE date in Age column
  When Earn-Take (Irregular) leave is added as a Pay component in a pay run, Age column in Leave Summary screen for employee to reflect the relevant PPE

• Employees with end dated pay group links cause pay day distribution to fail
  If employee pay group end date before pay period end date, the pay packet is valid so the employee should not be excluded.

• Timesheets naming "Online" cased error
  Able to process timesheet which name containing “Online”