Once again there’s been a considerable gap between the last time I emailed you about any new features. I don’t know if you missed hearing from me, but whenever there’s a long gap you can be sure it’s only because we’ve got surprises coming for you!
This time, we’ve got enhancements on almost all modules. Some are big improvements while some are small but all of them are bound to be useful to you.
Employee Database Management
Customize Employee Exit Reasons (when Deactivating Employees):
Earlier, whenever employees resigned or were terminated from your company, you had to choose from a preset list of resignation or termination reasons. A lot of customers requested for more flexibility in managing the list of reasons to be specified during deactivation. So, here you go – now you’ve got the option to not only edit the existing list of reasons we provide but also add an unlimited list of your own reasons for resignation or termination of employees.
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Employee Exit Report:
Ok, so some of you may say, “What’s the use of adding or editing resignation/termination reasons if there’s no statistics to understand why people leave or get fired in my company”, right? You bet! Presenting a whole new report which will give you a detailed view of which employees have left your company, reason for their departure, dates of exit, who deactivated their profile, and more! We’ve called it the Employee Exit Report.
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Leave Applications Tracking
New Leave History Table:
We used to have a leave history table which displayed information in number of past days format, like leaves taken in last 30-60-90-120 days, etc. We got feedback that it’s causing confusion and so we trashed that table! All employees will now get a swish new Leave History Table on their leaves page, which looks something like this:
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I’m sure this format will make things accurate and easy to understand.
New and Improved Leave Policy Form:
This one is for the Administrators. Though we give an exhaustive list of options and flexibilities while creating leave policies in sumHR, we’ve heard feedback that the leave policy creation form (the one which helps define leave rules), is often very confusing and ambiguous. And, we couldn’t agree more! So we decided to give a face list to the form and add a lot of help-text, re-word the labels, and make it more on the question-answer approach. Here’s a peek into it:
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Specify the Limit (in days) for Past Dated Leave Applications:
We’ve also added a small but powerful flexibility to the “past dated leaves” rule in the leave policy feature. This option will now let you control the limit of past-dated leave applications. So, if you’d like employees to be able to apply for past-dated leaves but limit the length up to 7 days, or 30 days or 90 days, it’s all up to you!
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Unpaid Leaves Report:
Though there were ways to keep track of unpaid leaves every month, using a combination of different reports, some customers felt the need for having a specific/dedicated report only for Unpaid leaves. So, we have now added an extra report in the Leaves category which will list only the Unpaid Leaves data for you.
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Streams – Enterprise Social Networking
Private Messaging (Inbox) in Streams:
This is one of my favourite features. It’s like a private little inbox within Streams for you to have confidential conversations off the public network in your company. It’s ideal for having discussions between managers, or heads of different teams/depts, etc. What’s more, you can schedule events, run polls, etc within it too!
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Option for Admin to Edit Messages in Streams
This one is for those of you who wish to have more power at hand, “just in case” you may need it! Now as an Administrator you can edit or delete any message in the entire company network (Streams), irrespective of who has posted it or which group it is in. Not just that, if you’re an employee with limited permissions, you can edit your own messages too.
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Other Miscellaneous Enhancements
New All-in-One Requests Management Page:
I’m sure you’re going to love this! This one goes out to all of those Admins and Managers who have tens/hundreds of requests to look into every month. We’ve revamped our Requests Management page and given you a page full of options to filter Requests by their Status (Pending/Processed), Type (Attendance/Leaves/Reimbursements, etc), By who, and more.
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Email Reminder for Pending Requests:
This one is especially for those procrastinators who don’t act on Attendance, Leaves or Reimbursement requests on time. It’s an automatic email reminder which can be enabled by the Admin, such that anyone with even 1 pending request of any kind, will get an email in the morning reminding them to look into it.
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Automatic Access for Managers to View their Reportees’ Attendance/Leaves:
There was a constant request from several customers asking us to give employees with reportees, direct access to their reportees’ Attendance and Leaves pages. This request came with the reason that it will help managers keep a tab on their team’s HR activities, which seemed quite a fair request – so we’ve added an automatic permission rule, which gives any employee with reportees, access to their Attendance and Leaves pages.
What’s Coming Up?
Well, this is the most exciting section of this post as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got some major major new updates coming up soon. Most important of these updates are:
1. A swanky new User-Interface, which will sweep you off your feet.
2. One-click payroll processing, meant to reduce all your payroll paperwork.
3. New convenient pricing plans, to make life easier to understand.
4. Online payment gateway system, for automating your payments and reducing my follow ups!
Until next time, hope you enjoy using these new features and as always, keep the feedback pouring – just like the monsoon rains here in Mumbai! 