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

2025 Release Notes:

May Summary

New Functionality

• Performance - Timesheet Deletion
  Improvements have been made to the way Timesheets are deleted, reducing the time required.

• Performance - Report Builder
  Improvements to the way that Report Builder reports run has reduced the time taken for these to complete.

• Performance - Employee Groups
  Improvements to the process for assigning Employees to Employee Groups with Rule Templates has reduced the time required.

April Summary

New Functionality

• CSV Reports Support Macrons
  A new Company Option ‘Use UTF8 Encoding for CSV and GL Reports’ has been added. This format will allow macrons to be displayed.

Fixes

• Performance - Bulk Changes
  An enhancement has been made to the Employee Bulk Changes tool to increase performance when making updates.
  
  

March Summary

New Functionality

• Last 4 Weeks Earnings
  The ‘Last 4 Weeks Ordinary Pay Earnings’ field can now be viewed in the ‘Annual Leave Rates’ component, which also allows it to be added to reports.

Fixes

• Company Controls Listing
  The Company Controls Listing report was not displaying the description (summarisation method) when it was run over a date range.

Tax Changes 2025

Open

February Summary

Fixes

• Add / Remove Reports Performance
  Speed when opening the Add / Remove Reports for distributions screen via right clicking on the Pay Group name in the Reporting screen has been greatly increased.

January Summary

New Functionality

• UTF8 Encoding Option
  A new Company Option has been added - “Use UTF8 Encoding for CSV and GL Reports”. This format will allow macrons to be displayed in General Ledger reports.

Fixes

• Usernames
  Usernames will now be prevented from being saved with trailing spaces.

• CSV Gross to Net Report
  The CSV Gross to Net report was not including Sick Leave in the Paid Leave Hours or Total Hours.

2024 Release Notes:

December Summary

New Functionality

• Payslip Dates on MyPay
  The Pay Packet Type (Reversal, Adjustment, Advance) and the Period End date that the transaction relates to will now be displayed in both the iOS & Android versions of MyPay.

• Direct Access Leave Balance
  Additional wording has been added to the Leave Request screen in Direct Access to clarify which period the balance relates to.

• CSV Payslip Report
  The ‘Tenure’ and ‘Occupation’ columns have been moved after Employee name, and ‘Direct Credit Date’ has been added to the CSV Payslip Report. The below columns have been removed from the report: Cash, Cheque, IRD Number (AU only), IsTotalLine, DirectCreditLabel, Student loan, YTDCash, YTDCheque, YTDOrdinaryHours, YTDOvertimeHours, YTDGrossTaxable, YTDNonTaxDeductions, YTDPAYE, YTDStudentLoan, YTDNonTaxPayments, YTDTaxableDeductions, YTDDirectCredit, AdditionalInformationName1, AdditionalInformationName2, AdditionalInformationName3, AdditionalInformationName4, AdditionalInformationName5, AdditionalInformationName6, AdditionalInformation1, AdditionalInformation2, AdditionalInformation3, AdditionalInformation4, AdditionalInformation5, AdditionalInformation6, PayslipMessage, PayPacketDescription

• CSV Payslip Report
  The CSV Payslip Report can now be run over a date range.
  
  

November Summary

New Functionality

• Leave in Days Improvements
  Calculations have been improved to support leave in days with timesheet values in hours for employees with work patterns.

• FBAPS Liability
  The option 'Daily Rates - Compare to Basic Rate' has been added to FBAPS liability and termination payments. If this is set to 'No', leave rate options 'ADP' and 'Pay in Days Last 52 weeks' will not compare to the employee's basic rate. 

  The basic rate comparison will also not occur for employees with no standard hours and days.

• CSV Gross to Net Report
  The CSV Gross to Net report has been updated to allow for scheduling over a date range.

• New Rate Fields
  The Relevant Daily Pay Rate and Average Daily Pay Rate values will always be displayed in FBAPS termination and liability components.

• Pay Period Dates in Direct Access Payslips
  The relevant Pay Period End date has been added to the Direct Access payslip screen for employees to be able to see which period the payslip relates to, without having to open the PDF version.

• Payslip Report Filtering
  The ability filter individual or multiple employees when running CSV Payslips report off screen has been added.

• Direct Access Leave Search
  The ability to Payroll admin to search leave in DA by employee name rather than just dates has been added. Filter option added to Name, Manager & Leave Type columns.

• ASB Direct Banking
  A new Bank File Type Option ‘ASB Direct Banking’ has been created, in preparation for the migration to the new ASB Direct Banking system.

Fixes

• Leave Balance Display
  An issue has been corrected where having multiple leave comments could result in the leave balance showing as double.

• Work Pattern Auto Fill
  The work pattern Auto Fill will now be accurate up to 8 decimal places if required.

October Summary

New Functionality

• Superannuation Summary Report
  The standard Superannuation Summary report now includes all employees who were paid a super irrespective of whether their start date is in the future.

• Remuneration History Screen
  Users with access to the ESS Embedded Remuneration History Screen in Direct Access will now be able print and export data.

• FBAPS Display
  Relevant Daily Pay Rate and Average Daily Pay Rate are now displayed in FBAPS payments

Fixes

• General Ledger Reporting
  A issue which could cause the General Ledger to display an incorrect amount if a component is costed by an attribute has been corrected.

• Summarisation Methods
  When an Employee Group is removed, it will no longer use summarisation methods of the removed Employee Group for the Component Setup Screen and Payslips.

• Annual Leave in Weeks
  Datapay will not attempt to calculate Ordinary Weekly Pay from the work pattern when the employee has allowances but no work pattern. The 4 Week calculation will be used instead.

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.
  
  

August Summary

Fixes

• Annual Leave Cash Up
  'Annual Leave Cash Up (Above Legal Minimum Only)' payments are now aligned to be included in 'Holiday Earnings' and 'Average Daily Pay Earnings', and be excluded from 'Ordinary Weekly Pay Earnings. This component should only be used to cash up additional weeks of annual leave (entitlement above 4 weeks).

• 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

• ACC Leave
  Paid ACC leave is now tagged with the 'Paid ACC Hours' attribute so that it is easier to identify in reporting.

• 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

Fixes

• Departmental Costing Report
  An issue has been corrected where the CSV Departmental Costing Report could contain duplicate roles when there are multiple timesheet entries due to costing.

New Functionality

• FBAPS Leave Payments Option
  A new option has been added to FBAPS payment components called “Daily Rates - Compare to basic Rate”. If this is set to ‘No’, the Leave Rate Options of ‘ADP’ and ‘Pay in Days 52 Weeks’ will not compare to the employee’s basic rate.

• BambooHR
  New notification emails have been introduced for successful sync, and sync with no change events.

• SFTP Logs
  A new screen has been added to the Reporting tab for companies which use our SFTP functionality. The screen shows the status of any files sent via distribution to our SFTP site, with the primary purpose being to add greater visibility for Direct Banking.

June Summary

Fixes

• Annual Leave in Weeks
  Datapay will no longer attempt to calculate Ordinary Weekly Pay from the work pattern when an employee has allowances but no work pattern. The 4 Week calculation will be used instead.

New Functionality

• PAYE Thresholds
  PAYE thresholds have been updated effective 31st July. For more information please see https://www.ird.govt.nz/pages/campaigns/personal-income-tax-threshold-changes

May Summary

Fixes

• Negative Leave Balance
  Occasionally there would be a display issue on the leave summary screen resulting in a negative leave balance after an employee was terminated in the same period as their leave anniversary. This has been fixed.

• Custom Holidays
  An issue has been fixed where in some scenarios a Custom Holiday created at the Company level could prevent the creation of a Pay Packet for a new employee.

New Functionality

• Public Holidays
  Public Holiday dates for 2026 have been added to Datapay.

April Summary

Fixes

• Rehiring via CSV Import
  When importing a rehired employee via the CSV upload of new employees, their rule template start dates are now also adjusted to their new start date.

• Workday GPC Connector
  The Workday GPC Connector is being aligned to Datapay behaviour: regardless of an employee's length of tenure, when the employee is terminated in Workday they will be terminated in Datapay. You can then process a termination payment for them in Datapay. This is a change to current state where, in the unusual event of an employee who starts and ends their tenure within a pay period is deleted, you cannot process their termination payment in Datapay.

• Remuneration Change Processing
  An issue has been corrected which could slow the processing of remuneration changes.

• Workday GPC Connector
  The Workday GPC Connector will now only return a 0 (zero) balance when employees are currently enrolled in the flexible leave programme.

• Workday GPC Connector
  The Workday GPC Connector will now return a 0 (zero) balance when an employee has fully exhausted their leave accrual and entitlement balances. This enables the balance in Workday to be reset.

• Role Access Update
  Users with the roles of “Company Report Builder” and “Read Only Payroll Officer” can log in to the Datapay application without receiving “Access Denied” errors.

• Role Access Update
  Previously, Users with the role “Read-only payroll officer”, or any equivalent roles without access to Company Setup will receive an error “XEM8003 Access denied” when clicking on the Company tab. This has been resolved, and clicking on the Company tab will no longer generate an error if the user has access to view company.

New Functionality

• ACC levy Rates Update
  ACC Premium Reports have been updated to use the new ACC levy rates

March Summary

Fixes

• Importing Bank Accounts
  Improved the validation process on bank account suffix information when importing employee changes.

• Importing Employee Changes
  Improved the validation process on the EmployeeCode field when importing employee changes via csv to no longer be case sensitive. E.g. An employee code of ‘Emp1234’ in the import file will now successfully match with the employee ‘EMP1234’ in Datapay.

New Functionality

• ACC Earners' Levy Threshold and Rate
  PAYE calculations have been updated to use the new ACC Earners' Levy threshold of $142,283 and rate of $1.60 for every $100 of liable earnings from 1 April 2024.

• ACC Premium Report & Tax year End Certificate
  The ACC Premium Reports and Tax Year-End Earnings Certificates have been updated to use the new ACC Earners' Levy threshold of $142,283 and rate of $1.60 for every $100 of liable earnings from 1 April 2024.

• Extra Pay PAYE Calculation
  For improved clarity, in the "Extra Pay PAYE" component the default setting of "Extra Pay Elected Tax Rate" has been renamed to "System Calculated".

• Extra Pay PAYE Visibility
  Two new fields have been added to the Detailed View of the Extra Pay PAYE component to provide additional information and give move transparency around how the tax rate is calculated.

• Student Loan Threshold
  The Student Loan repayment threshold has been updated to $24,128 per year ($464 per week) from 1 April 2024.

February Summary

Fixes

• Multiple Home Costings in AdHoc Reports
  An issue has been corrected where employees with multiple Home Cost Allocations could cause Report Builder reports to fail in some scenarios.

• Deductions Exceeding Ordinary Earnings
  If a non-taxable deduction exceeds the Ordinary Earnings, the non-taxable deduction will deduct from Lump Sum payments (if any exist) before tax is calculated.

• Remuneration History
  Resolved an issue where the Generate Remuneration History tool was not recalculating remuneration packages.

• Email Wording
  Datapay Leave Request emails have had the words “Unmanned Account” replaced with “Unmonitored Account”.

New Functionality

• MyPay Pay Packets
  Reversal & Adjustment Pay Packets are now available for view via the MyPay app, just as they are on Direct Access.

2023 Release Notes:

December Summary

Fixes

• ADP Rate on Public Holiday
  Fixed an issue with calculating the ADP rate on Public Holiday Taken when part of the day was worked.

New Functionality

• Payslip Occupation
  The Employee Occupation field is now available to add into Payslips.

• Disable Costing in Direct Access
  Admin Users now have the ability to disable the ability for all users to add Cost Centers in Direct Access Timesheets. When this option is selected, Timesheet users will no longer see the Add Cost Center option, and the Cost Center will default to whatever it set in DataPay. This new option can be found in DataPay via the Pay Groups > Timesheet Options screen.

November Summary

Fixes

• Alternative Holiday Termination Value
  An issue has been corrected which could cause the Alternative Holiday Termination Value calculation to return absurd values after reconstructing leave balances as part of the conversion from holding the leave in Hours to Days.

New Functionality

• BambooHR
  An improvement has been made to the BambooHR API Integration to provide additional information about the employee and field in question in the error notification email.

• New Gender Option
  A new Gender option has been added to Datapay - ”Prefer Not To Say”

• Annual Leave Calculations
  There is now a new Ordinary Weekly Pay Calculation Option that can be used when Annual Leave is in Weeks. The new option is 'Higher OWP Rate' and will pay the higher of '1 Week OWP' and '4 Week OWP'.

• Error & Warnings Report - Ordinary Monthly Pay
  An enhancement has been made to the Error & Warnings report, adding a new Warning when an employee’s Ordinary Monthly Pay hours is negative for Monthly and Bi-Monthly pay frequencies. This Warning is already in place for Weekly and Fortnightly pay frequencies.
  
  

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.

• RDP Rate
  In rare scenarios the RDP rate calculated could be slightly incorrect due to rounding issues and the order in which information is processed.

• Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination - Processed Pay Packets
  When the above functionality is enabled, users may see an extra step in the process which ensures the employee pay packet is processed prior to performing any calculations.

• Annual Leave in Weeks
  When Annual Leave is held in weeks, and an employee moves to a new pay group, the calculation to determine the Average Weekly Earnings has been improved

• Alt Holiday Entitlement
  Timesheet employees will no longer be automatically credited a day of Alternative Holiday if they work a Public Holiday on a day that is not in their work pattern.

• Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination
  When the company option 'Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination' is enabled, you will no longer be asked to decide if other leave types (in addition to annual leave) should be included in the calculation for each individual termination. This was not required by most companies and caused confusion for many. If you have a company policy to include other leave types in this calculation, please contact Datacom.

• 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.

• Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination - Leave in Weeks
  The functionality to 'Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination' has now been enhanced to work when annual leave is in weeks

• Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination - Visibility of Public Holidays
  When the above functionality is enabled, users will see a new step in the wizard which clearly displays which Public Holidays are being paid to the employee.

• 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. This field is used in Payday Filing and sent to the IRD. Clients will need to submit a request to Business Tool Box to have this field added to the field be added into the BambooHR ‘Payroll - NZ’ tab.

• Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination - ‘Pay Public Holidays’
  When the company option 'Automatically Calculate Public Holidays to Pay on Termination' is enabled, this now takes effect when applying the termination payments regardless of whether 'Pay Public Holidays' is ticked in the employee's work pattern.

• Updating Report
  The Updating Report has been enhanced to include the “From” and “To” time along with the date.

• Payday Credit Reconciliation Report
  A number of improvements have been made to the Payday Credit Reconciliation Report:
  - A new Report Option has been added to allow the report to be run across a Date Range instead of just the target Pay Run. This Date Range can be either Period End Date or Direct Credit Date, however the option defaults to Direct Credit Date.
  - When using Date Range there are two new columns: Date Range (DD MMM YYYY), and Search Type (“DC Date” or “Period End Date”)
  - Two columns have been renamed. “Direct Credit Date” is now “Original Direct Credit Date”, and “Period” is now “Original Period End Date”
  - Three redundant columns have been removed: “Gross Earnings”, “Earnings Not Liable” and “Lump Sum Ind.”
  - Two new columns have been added: “PAYE” and “IR Total”. IR Total is the sum of all IR related payments (PAYE, Child Support, Student Loan, KiwiSaver Deductions, Kiwisaver Employer Contribution, ESCT, Tax Credit from Payroll Deductions)
  
  

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

• Negative Leave Liability
  An issue has been corrected where an employee with an Annual Leave Balance of zero could have their Annual Leave Liability unexpectedly set to zero as well.

• Company Component Values
  Previously when deleting a Component from a company any company specific values that had been set were not deleted alongside the component. As such, if the component was recreated at a later date it would pick up these old values and pre-populate the new Component. Going forward all values will be deleted with the Component.

• ADP - Minimum Basic Hourly Rate
  ADP calculations have been enhanced so that it will now calculate a daily rate based on the ‘On Leave’ hours if these have been supplied.

• CSV Employee Import
  When importing new Employees via CSV file a Pay Packet was not always being created for each Employee. Going forward Pay Packets will be created for each Employee where a Pay Run that covers the Employee start date is open.

• BambooHR Integration
  The error message which is displayed when there are multiple Employee Groups within Datapay with the same name has been improved.

• General Ledger Report
  Units of hours in the General Ledger report have been updated to account for Annual Leave in Weeks to ensure calculations are constant and correct.
  
  

New Functionality

• CUSTOM4 Report
  The CUSTOM4 Report (Predicted Leave Balances Report) has been updated to include Annual Leave in Weeks.

• 2025 Public Holidays
  Public Holidays have been added to the leave calendar for 2025.
  
  

July Summary

Fixes

• GET Employee API
  The GET Employee (by ID) API call has been updated to return an employee’s Pay Condition Employee Group assignment effective start date for both the Standard Hours per Week and Standard Days per Week date values.

• CSV Employee Import
  When attempting to import multiple new employees with an assigned manager via the CSV import tool, this is now able to correctly assign each employee to their manager.

• BambooHR Integration
  The BambooHR integration was previously sending through data when no change has happened for a small number of fields. The process has been updated to no longer send through unchanged values.

• End Dated Users in Distributions
  End-dated Users that are also report users were still being shown in the Report Distribution wizard, even though no reports would be sent to them. The wizard has been updated to only show Users which it will send reports to.

• Historic Leave Earnings Screen
  In a new Pay Group the “Period End Date” column within the Historic Leave Earnings screen could display dates that are incorrect as they do not align with the Pay Groups “First PPE Date” value. This was only a display issue and would be corrected once the Pay Group finalised its first Pay Run. Going forward the dates should be correct right from the start.

New Functionality

• Import Timesheet API
  The timesheet import API has been updated to have the same Costbox Assumption functionality that the CSV Timesheet import process uses. This allows for only the last/lowest level of costing to be specified in the import, with the higher levels added in automatically, assuming that each row in the cost structure is unique.
  This has been added for V2 and V3 of the API.

Performance

• Company Components
  Performance enhancements have been made for editing Company Component attributes.
  
  

June Summary

Fixes

• Annual Leave Additional Entitlement
  The Annual Leave Additional Entitlement (LALAE) component is now compatible with the Annual Leave Entitlement unit of Weeks.

• Converting to Position Structure
  A check has been added to prevent companies from converting to a position structure if they are the only company in the company group.

• Bulk Change Wizard
  The Bulk Change Wizard was previously able to pick up employees without an active Pay Group link (e.g. draft employees) which would cause it to fail and display an error message. Going forward these employees will be excluded from the Wizard.

• Termination Wizard
  When automated termination payments are applied to the pay run, users now have the option to select extra leave types that were not selected at the time of termination with the wizard.

• Deleting the Head of Hierarchy
  Previously the Employee set as the Head of Hierarchy was able to be deleted, which would prevent the Company Organisation screen from being displayed. The Delete Employee functionality has been updated to prevent this.

• Comparing Payslips via Payslip History
  When selecting multiple payslips for comparison, Annual Leave taken was always displayed in Hours. Going forward Annual Leave Taken will be displayed in the unit the leave is set to.

• Holiday Year Earnings
  The Holiday Year Earnings could previously be too low if the employee anniversary date fell in a pay period where the employee is also joining or leaving the Pay Group mid period.

• Bulk Changes
  The Bulk Change tool could unintentionally End Date values set at Country scope level when the “End Existing Value” option is ticked. Going forward these values are being excluded from the tool as originally intended.
  
  

June 1st

Fixes

• Employee Import & Costing
  Previously when an employee was imported/updated via either CSV or API there could be a new costing line created (with the existing line end dated) when there was no change to the employee costing. Going forward no additional costing entry will be created in this sceneario.

• 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.
  
  

May 4th

Fixes

• Saving Company Options
  In some scenarios a Payroll Administrator could receive a “The Current Operation is not Permitted” error when attempting to save a change on the Company Options page. This has been corrected.

• Annual Leave in Weeks Warning
  After Annual Leave in Weeks was turned on for a company, the Pay Packet Warning “ANNUAL LEAVE PAID” would no longer show, even if it was not dismissed. Going forward the warning will display when intended.

• Termination Wizard
  Removing termination payments with the Termination Wizard was not always successful previously, and could leave the Leave Adjustment value in place resulting in a Holiday Liability value of $0.00.

April 6th

Tax Changes 2023

Open

New Functionality

• New Standard Report - ESCT Rate Checking Report
  A new standard report has been created to assist Payroll Administrators in confirming their employees are set up with the correct ESCT Rate. For more information on the new report, please see the Report: ESCT Rate Checking Report DataHelp page.

• ACC Levy Rates for 2024 Tax Year
  The ACC Premium Report and Estimated ACC Premium Reports have been updated to use the new ACC Levy rates.

• ESCT Rate Calculation
  ESCT Rate calculations will now take into account pay packets within the target financial year, which were for “future” periods outside the financial year.

• Non-Rounded (8dp) Value of Entitlement
  On the Leave Summary Screen users can now click on the “Value of Entitlement” button and see the Leave Entitlement Balance that was used to calculate this entitlement value to 8 dp. Values shown on the Leave Summary Screen are rounded to 2 dp.

Fixes

• Pay Packets with No Earnings
  In rare situations it was possible for a pay packet with no earnings to calculate PAYE. This is no longer possible.

• Incorrect Leave Liability after Reinstatement
  Employees who were terminated and then reinstated during the same period could cause some calculations to unintentionally include data from the termination pay packet (specifically the termination payment value) resulting in an incorrect, and often negative leave liability

March 2nd

Fixes

• Password Criteria in Direct Access
  The Direct Access functionality to change the report password for a user was not confirming to the standard password requirements, and allowing users to create passwords with either a space or the “ character, both of which will cause report distributions to fail if sent to those users. This functionality has been updated to match the password policy used in other areas of the system.

• Payslip Message
  The Payslip Message field was only pulling through into the Payslip Report when data was stored within the Component Setup screen and not from the Pay Components screen.

• Annual Leave Summarisation Method
  Values from the Annual Leave Termination Payment calculation were showing up to 8 decimal places in some reports. This has now been reduced to 5 decimal places.

• Annual Leave Recalculations
  When an employee was set to be terminated part way through a period then the pay packet was recalculated, the Annual Leave Standard Accrual component was recalculated for the entire period instead of only up until the termination date.

• Applying Leave to a Pay Packet
  When attempting to apply a Leave Request to a Pay Packet, occasionally administrators would receive a “Sequence contains more than one matching element” error. This has been corrected.

• Days Paid Via Timesheet for Leave Request
  If a Work Pattern Timesheet employee takes Annual Leave (paid in Days), and an incorrect amount of Days Paid is added to a Timesheet during the dates of the Leave Request, the rate at which the Annual Leave is paid at could be inflated. This will no longer occur.
  
  
  

February 2nd

New Functionality

• Pay Group Scope in Reporting Tab
  Pay Group scope level users will now be able to add non-employee Users under the Reporting tab, to match what Company scope level users can do.

Fixes

• Timesheet Naming
  CSV or Excel Timesheets with the word “Online” in the name would fail when admins attempted to upload them, as the system was expecting them to be from ESS / Direct Access. The process has been updated to no longer look for this word in the timesheet file name.

• Annual Leave Rounding
  Removed rounding from Annual Leave Liability calculations to give greater accuracy.

• Annual Leave Liability in Weeks
  The Annual Leave Liability value could previously be incorrect when using Weeks and there are multiple manual adjustments that clear and revert the balance.

• Report Distribution Reliability
  Report Distributions with non-PDF files would previously fail is the recipient’s password contained either the space or “ characters.

2022 Release Notes:

December 1st

New Functionality

• Public Holiday Worked - Automatic Entitlement
  Going forward the correct number of Alternative Holidays will be credited when an auto paid employee with a variable work pattern works on a public holiday, assuming the 'Alternative Holiday ?' field is set to either 'Yes' or 'Yes Round Down'. Previously if the Public Holiday Worked fell on a day with more hours than the average number of work pattern hours, the employee would be credited with 2 days.

• Public Holiday Worked - Minimum Top Up
  Previously if an auto paid employee worked a portion of a Public Holiday, DataPay reduced their Public Holiday Taken by the same amount, but still leaving the remainder of the day as Public Holiday Taken. This is above and beyond legislation.

  A new option for the "Auto Reduce Hours?" field on the Public Holiday Worked component has been introduced called "Holidays Act: Public Holiday Taken" which will reduce the Public Holiday Taken hours to zero if any Public Holiday Worked hours are entered, in order to pay the minimum required amount under legislation.

Fixes

• Third Party Import Files
  An issue has been corrected where employees could have their Home Costing Start Date set to the Pay Period Start Date instead of the value from the file.

• Reinstating Employees
  Home Cost Allocations with invalid End Dates were preventing employees from being reinstated. The process has been updated to be able to cater for this scenario.

• General Ledger
  The General Ledger file was showing duplicate lines for Hours Paid when there was both a Text type field and Hours Paid type field set up in the GL Code Format and the Text type field is set to show different text for Credits and Debits.

• Bay Pay Calculator
  When attempting to edit Back Pay lines for components with a "Number to Pay" field the system failed to format the lines. This has been resolved.

• Leave Audit Report (CUSTOM10002)
  The Public Holiday Rate and Public Holiday Scope Level fields were previously blank in the Leave Audit Report.

• Public Holiday Worked
  Public Holiday Taken in Days is now correctly reduced by Public Holiday Worked for auto paid employees with a variable work pattern.

• Public Holiday Worked
  The Public Holiday Worked components will now reduce the correct Public Holiday Taken component when there are multiple public holidays in a single pay period.
  
  
  

November 3rd

New Functionality

• Custom Work Patterns
  The previous limit for custom work patterns (56 days) has been extended to 255 days.

• Days Paid - Timesheets
  When Days Paid is generated from multiple sources, new functionality has been introduced to ensure there is no more than 1 Days Paid for a single date.

• Free Text Fields
  An exception was thrown if data entered in the Free Text Fields on the More Details page for an employee was in an incorrect format. Now a Business Rule message will be generated giving details of what needs to be done when invalid data is entered.

Fixes

• Days Paid - Direct Access Leave
  When an employee with a work pattern creates a leave request in Direct Access, the 'Leave Days' value will now reflect the portion of the work pattern on leave.

• Days Paid - ESS Leave
  If a company has Direct Access enabled, users will no longer be able to create leave requests via Employee Self Service.

• Days Paid - Timesheets
  Users are now able to import timesheets with Days Paid values into a Manual pay run.

• Editing Component Attributes
  The issue causing the Optimistic Locking error sometimes received when attempting to edit the attributes of a component has been resolved.

• Undo Termination
  For companies using Cross Company Reporting, an exception was being thrown when trying to undo a termination for an employee who had a termination date before their latest reporting line change

• Delete Employee
  Deleting an employee could cause empty Manual pay runs to show in the pay run screen. This has been corrected.

• Employee Import
  Bulk importing of employees was failing when the company was part of a company group using the "Unique Employee Codes Across Companies" option. 

October 6th

New Functionality

• Reporting Label Change
  The "Period End" label within Report Builder has been renamed to "Pay Period" to be consistent and avoid confusion.

• Sick Leave Cash Up Component
  Added the Sick Leave Cash Up (435CU) to all environments to ensure consistency.

• Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Day
  Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Day has been added to DataPay as a public holiday on 26th September 2022.

• South Canterbury Anniversary Day
  South Canterbury Anniversary Day has been shifted to 11th November 2022.

Fixes

• Cash Up Component Attributes
  Some Cash Up components still had the Ordinary Weekly Pay Earnings attribute selected when these earnings should be excluded from OWP Earnings. Additionally, some Cash Up components did not have the ADP Earnings attribute which they should have. Updates were made to correct the affected components.

• Incorrect Annual Leave Liability
  Rounding has been removed from Annual Leave Liability calculations to give greater accuracy.

• Timesheet Import API
  An issue has been corrected where the Timesheet Import API would fail if there was more than one reference value rate with the same name.

September 1st

New Functionality

• J.P. Morgan Bank File
  The Employee Code and Particulars fields have been added to the J.P. Morgan bank file.

• New BAPS Leave Rate Option
  A new BAPS Leave Rate Option for Days has been created called "ADP - Minimum Basic Hourly Rate". This will pay an employees Basic Rate if it is higher than their ADP rate. If no work pattern exists, the On Leave hours entered into the Leave Request will be used to calculate the basic daily rate.

Fixes

• Accumulated Bank File Distributions
  In rare situations a distribution containing the Accumulated Bank File report can become stuck when attempting to email. This can only happen to clients with specific setup options.

• All In Advance Leave Requests
  An issue has been corrected where if a Leave Request spans multiple periods and is applied All In Advance, the Days Paid are all applied to the future pay packet(s).

• Company Org Structure
  Corrected an issue which could prevent the Company Org Structure from loading if there was incorrect data created during an Org Structure import where the Head of Hierarchy was reporting to an employee.  

• Leave Rate Calculations
  In rare scenarios the leave rate calculations for an employee could be briefly affected after they transferred between two pay groups. This has been corrected.

• Undo Terminations
  The Undo Termination functionality could fail in some cases due to inconsistent data relating to pay group start dates.

August 4th

New Functionality

• J.P. Morgan Bank File
  A new bank file type has been created so that DataPay has support for clients using J.P. Morgan bank.

Fixes

• Error Message - Checking Distributions
  A generic exception error was being thrown when a checking distribution failed due to containing a non-PDF report. Going forward a Business Rule Exception will be triggered instead which explains the issue and reason.

• Error Message - Pay Group Report Subscription
  A generic exception error was being thrown when finalising a pay run if a report was removed from the Pay Group yet was still part of the distribution. A new Business Rule Exception message will be displayed instead which explains the issue.

• Back Pay Calculator
  The Back Pay Calculator would sometimes fail to load all the information required to calculate and process Back Pays, which would result in an error. This process has been improved.

Performance

• Remuneration History
  The Remuneration History screen was sometimes failing to load due to a timeout. Changes have been made to increase the speed of the page and to prevent the issue from occurring.

July 7th

New Functionality

• Custom Holidays for Timesheet Employees
  Custom Holidays were previously only able to apply the relevant component into the pay packet of Auto-Paid employees. This functionality will also now work for Timesheet employees.

Fixes

• Direct Access Timesheets
  An issue has been corrected which was causing a timesheet to display more hours than the employee work pattern where leave spanned multiple pay periods and was approved retrospectively.

• Opening Previous Pay Runs
  Previously if an employee "Pay Setup" value had been deleted then any pay run with a now missing value was unable to be opened/viewed from the Pay Run screen. This has been corrected to ensure all old pay runs can be viewed.

• Company Organisation Structure
  Users would previously disappear from the Company Organisation Structure if the User account was end dated. Users will now remain in the Org Structure until the employee record has been terminated.

• General Ledger Leave Liability
  Leave Liability values would be reported incorrectly in the General Ledger if the Liability figure in an Adjustment pay packet is different to that in the Reversal (e.g. due to a change in the Adjustment which affects leave liability). Going forward the GL will only include the liability figure for the latest pay packet, typically a Main opposed to an Adjustment.

Performance

• Pay Run List View
  For some companies the Pay Run list was slow to load. Performance in this area has been improved.

• Remuneration Changes
  Remuneration related changes could occasionally cause the Remuneration History screen to take a long time or even get completely stuck when processing the change. This process has been improved and the issue should no longer occur.

June 2nd

New Functionality

• ACC Levy Rates for 2023
  ACC Levy rates have been updated on the ACC Premium report for the 2023 tax year.

Fixes

• Leave Days in DA Leave Requests
  Creating a Leave Request on the Administrator screen of Direct Access for an employee will now save their work pattern days as the Days Taken value. Previously this was saving as zero days.

• Court Deduction Component Update
  District Court Attachment Orders (e.g. Court Fines) were not excluding ACC Earners' Levy from calculations as expected. This resulted in the Maximum Deduction being too low. The Protected Net Earnings value is now also shown in the component.

• Days Paid 
  In a rare scenario, Days Paid values were not being imported from Leave Requests as expected. This has now been corrected.
  
  
  

May 5th

New Functionality

• General Ledger Field
  A new field type has been added to the General Ledger setup called "Employee Known As" to provide an alternative to First Name.

• Terminated Employee Report Subscriptions
  Report Distributions will fail if one of the recipient User accounts is linked to an Employee record which has been terminated. To prevent this from happening the linked User account will be removed from the Reporting tab if the Employee is terminated.

Fixes

• Leave Requests
  Leave Requests can no longer be created by Administrator users in the desktop client for inactive leave components.
  
  
  

April 7th

New Functionality

• General Ledger Debit Override
  A new feature to force values typically shown as Credits to display as Debits has been added to the General Ledger. The "Activate 'is Debit' Override" checkbox is located on the Cost Category.

• ACC Earners' Levy
  From 1st April 2022 the ACC Earners' Levy threshold has increased to $136,544 and the rate to $1.46

• Student Loan
  From 1st April 2022 the annual student loan repayment threshold has increased to $21,268

• Crediting Alternative Holidays
  The Public Holiday Worked components have an option to automatically credit an Alternative Holiday, however this would credit two days leave if the employee worked more than their typical hours on that day. A new calculation method has been created called 'Yes Round Down' which will round the amount credited down to the nearest number of days.
  
  

Fixes

• DataHR Mandatory Fields
  An issue has been corrected where it was occasionally possible to save a mandatory field as empty.

• Timesheet API
  The ability to not process empty values submitted via the timesheet API has been added. This was previously causing timesheets to be left in a status of Partially Complete.

• Service Allowance Units
  Service Allowances will now pick up the correct Holiday Hours where annual leave is paid in Days or Weeks.

• Days Paid for Public Holidays Taken
  The "Automatically Calculate Days Paid on Timesheet" now also generates Days Paid for Public Holidays Taken that are created by an employee's Work Pattern.

• Absent Weeks
  In rare occasions if an employee had multiple pay packets for a Pay Period their 'Absent Weeks' value (e.g. from starting over half way through the period) could be duplicated.

• Lump Sum ACC Earners' Levy
  For non-STC tax codes with a Lump Sum payment, the Extra Pay PAYE ACC Earners Levy was being calculated incorrectly (as $0) when the last 4 weeks grossed up amount does not exceed the ACC Earners Levy Threshold but the grossed up amount plus lump sum did. This has been corrected.

• BAPS RDP for Cash Up
  The RDP (Days) Leave Rate Option will no longer do an ADP comparison for Cash Up and Termination payments. This was previously allowing these payments to be paid at a higher rate than expected.
  
  
  

March 2nd

New Functionality

• Gross & Expanded Variance Reports
  Two new component categories have been added to the component filter screen: Benefit and Leave Taken.

• SLCIR Warning
  A new Pay Packet Warning has been added to alert users when SLCIR has been used with a non SL tax code.

• Ordinary Smoothed Pay
  Ordinary Smoothed Pay now has the option to not pay negative hours.

• MyPay Public Holiday Calendar
  Public Holidays have been added to MyPay for 2023 and 2024

• ImportTimesheet API
  The ImportTimesheet API now has the ability to import multiple rates for a component. Previously the APi was limited to importing a single "rate x occurrence" entry for a component.

Fixes

• ImportEmployee API
  An issue has been corrected where the ImportEmployee API was being used to move an employee between Pay Groups and could not deal with situations where there was an existing Pay Packet. This could result in the employee being paid in both Pay Groups for that period.

• Days Paid
  Days Paid is no longer imported from ACC Subsequent Taken Leave Requests and other unpaid leave types and now behaves the same way as Leave Without Pay. This was inflating the Days Paid value within a Pay Packet.

• Days Paid
  In the scenario where Days Paid was automatically calculated during a timesheet import and unpaid leave was also applied via a leave request, Days Paid could be mistakenly reduced. 
  
  
  

February 3rd

Tax Changes April 2022

Preparation for the various tax changes coming into effect on 1st April 2022 have been added to DataPay ready to be enabled. For more information please see the attached file:

Open

New Functionality

• API Improvements
  The Timesheet API can now import multiple rates for each "rate x occurrence" component. Previously this was limited to one rate per component.

• Gross Variance Report & Extended Gross Variance Report 
  Two additional component categories (Leave Taken & Benefits) have been added to the existing list (Payments, Leave, Allowance & Salary Sacrifice) which can be filtered for both reports.

• Continuous Annual Leave Rates
  Functionality has been released which changes the way that leave is paid when a single period of leave is spread over multiple leave requests. For detailed information on how this works please see the DataHelp article on it here.

• Continuous Annual Leave Rates - New Option
  A new option has been added to DataPay to allow payroll teams to pay a continuous period of leave at at the current leave rate if it's higher than the compliant rate. More information on this can be found here.

• Tax Changes 2022
  Preparation for the various tax changes coming into effect on 1st April 2022 have been added to DataPay ready to be enabled. For more information on this please see the attachment above.

• Ordinary Smoothed Pay
  Ordinary Smoothed Pay now has the option not to pay negative hours.

• MyPay Public Holidays
  Public Holidays for 2023 and 2024 have been added to the MyPay calendar.

Fixes

• API
  Corrected an issue where the ImportEmployee API didn't deal with existing pay packets when an employee moves between pay groups.

• ACC Subsequent Days Paid
  For an employee with no work pattern, importing ACC Subsequent into a pay packet was inflating their Days Paid. Going forward ACC Subsequent will not contribute to Days Paid.

• SLCIR
  A new pay packet warning has been introduced when SLCIR is used with a non SL tax code. This will prompt users to enter a Manual Pay Amount if required.

• Days Paid
  When Days Paid was automatically calculated during a timesheet import and unpaid leave was applied via a Leave Request, Days Paid could be mistakenly reduced. This has been corrected.
  
  
  

January 20th

New Functionality

• Days Paid on Leave Requests
  Creating a leave request on Employee or Manager screens via Direct Access for an employee will now capture the Leave Days Taken for an employee with a work pattern to improve the accuracy of the Days Paid calculation. Previously leave requests used a value of 0.

• Updating Report
  The Updating Report was reporting all remuneration Reason for Change instances each time a change was made, which could result in large amounts of irrelevant data in the report. A new Report Option called 'Exclude System Generated Values' has been introduced and is enabled by default.

• Bank Account Validation
  The Bank Account validation process has been expanded to accept the '04' bank code with branch codes of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Fixes

• ADP Employee Variance ReportThe ADP Employee Variance report was showing a termination date one day later than actual for employees. This has now been updated to show the correct date.