New Feature: Bulk Leave Import

We’ve had several requests asking for a way for payroll administrators and leave admins to record leave in bulk and we’re delighted to let you know that this feature is now here! This means that there are now 3 ways for leave to be captured on the system:

  • Employees can request leave via self-service or our mobile app which then gets captured once approved by a leave approver.
  • Payroll administrators and leave admins can record leave for individual employees via an employee’s profile.
  • Payroll administrators and leave admins can download an Excel file, complete it with the relevant leave days and upload the file into SimplePay.

For more information on how to use this new feature, head to our help page.

We’re continuing our mission to revolutionise payroll, and in the process make SimplePay the preferred payroll software provider for small and medium sized businesses. We hope that with the additional method for recording leave, every user now has an option that meets their needs.

If you have any queries on how to use the system or any suggestions on how we can better serve your needs, please reach out to us.

Team SimplePay

Improved Functionality for Deleting Leave Requests

At SimplePay, we believe in continuous improvement and are therefore committed to refining and enhancing the system to better suit your needs. With that in mind, we have made tweaks to our leave functionality to improve the deleting of leave requests. We’d like to highlight some of these changes:

  • In addition to payroll administrators and leave admins, previously approved leave requests can now also be deleted by any leave approver that is part of the employee’s approval group.
  • Where the payslip for the period when the leave dates occurred is unfinalised, the leave request will immediately be deleted in its entirety when clicking on Delete
  • Leave requests with leave dates that fall during a pay period with finalised payslips will result in the opening of a new screen when clicking on Delete. From this screen, you can
    • see which of the leave days cannot be deleted as they impact the pay on a finalised payslip, and which of them can be deleted;
    • directly open the payslip where the nett pay is impacted by the leave, if you have administrator rights in addition to being a leave approver; 
    • opt to delete leave in its entirety (the default) or superficially*.

*The Retain these leave dates? checkbox is used to indicate whether leave should be deleted in its entirety or superficially. If you leave the option unchecked, the leave request will be deleted in its entirety (the leave request will be deleted, the leave days will be removed from the calendar and the leave days will be added back to the employee’s leave balance). If you select the checkbox, the leave request will be deleted superficially (only the actual request will be deleted, but the leave will remain recorded in the leave calendar and the leave balance will still take into account the leave days recorded).

You can read more about deleting leave on our help page here.

We hope these improvements provide more useful information and a more enjoyable user experience. 

If you require any assistance, please reach out to our Support team here.

Team SimplePay

Leave Take-Ons: New and Improved

We are very happy to inform you that we have re-designed the way that leave take-on balances are captured. The new and improved take-on screen will provide you with greater flexibility and is also more informative. Additionally, you will now have the option to add leave take-on balances in bulk.

Please note: the information in this blog post does, unfortunately, not apply to clients who are still on Version 1 of our leave system; however, we’re working very hard on migrating everyone to the latest version as soon as possible.

In cases where you previously used another payroll system before you started using SimplePay,  you can add leave take-on balances for your employees.

Alternatively, you might want to enter leave balances as at a particular date. The redesigned leave take-on screen allows you to do this too because you are able to choose the date for the end of the take-on period.

The system will automatically calculate the leave accrued from the start of the leave cycle to the end of the take-on period and will also take into consideration leave days taken and leave adjustments recorded on the system. It will even allow you to enter the number of leave days that were captured off-system.

Additionally, the system will automatically calculate a closing balance – as at the end of the take-on period – based on information in the other fields. However, if the leave policy allows for leave to be carried forward, you will be able to override the automatically calculated closing balance and enter the desired balance.

More information about leave take-on balances and the handy new take-on fields that we’ve added can be found on our help site.

Another great improvement is that it is now possible to add leave take-on balances for your employees in bulk – thereby eliminating the need to repeat the same steps over and over for all your employees.  More information about how to do these bulk inputs can be found here.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to email us at support@simplepay.co.za to assist you.

The SimplePay Team

New Roles and Permissions

Another exciting new feature has just gone live!

In response to requests from many clients, we have increased the number of roles that you can assign to users on the system, each of which has a different set of associated permissions that determines what the user can see and do on the system.

Previously, you were only able to restrict the access of users to certain companies / payment frequencies / pay points. You will now still be able to do this… and more! There are now three possible roles that you can assign to a user: Admin, Leave Admin and Approval Only.

All existing users on the system will, by default, be assigned the Admin role. Therefore, they will still be able to do exactly what they were able to do in the past. Additionally, any restrictions to companies / payment frequencies / pay points that you had previously put in place, will still be in effect.

The two new roles – Leave Admin and Approval Only – were designed to make your life easier and give you more flexibility. For example, you can assign the Leave Admin role to someone who only administers leave but should not have access to any salary information, or someone who should only be able to approve leave / info update requests, can be assigned the Approval Only role.

However, if you have no need for these new roles, you can ignore these changes and continue as you did before – with all users having the Admin role.

If you would like to read more about the new roles that we have introduced, you can click here. Additionally, you can find more general information about managing users by clicking here.

Please note: this new feature has necessitated some terminology changes on the system: previously, we used to talk about multiple “roles” that could be associated with an email address. However, now we will refer to multiple “users” being associated with that email address. More information about multiple users is available here.

As always, your feedback will be highly valued, especially since we are considering adding more roles in the future.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to email us at support@simplepay.co.za to assist you.

The SimplePay Team

Getting Started with Employee Self Service

Here at SimplePay, we believe that taking leave and getting paid should be the least stressful work related things that your employees can do. In the past, however, this hasn’t always been the case, mostly because of all of the red tape and paperwork involved in collecting payslips, and requesting and approving leave.

In our mission to make your payroll experience as simple as possible, we decided to address this issue by including a convenient and easy to use leave requesting and approval system. Your  employees will never have to be late for the holiday of a lifetime because their leave didn’t get approved in time. Check out the rest of the post for more information on how you can make your life easier by using employee self service.

Once you’ve logged into SimplePay, click on the Employees tab and then select Manage Self-Service on the right side of the page.

1

This will bring up a page displaying all of the employees in the company, with blank spaces in which you can fill in their E-Mail addresses. Go ahead and fill these in for all of the employees for whom you want to enable self-service, after which you can tick the Enabled box. After you have done this you can click on the Save button, which will send emails to everyone on this list, requesting them to create an account that they will be able to use to check payslips and request or approve leave.

The next step in this process is to go to Manage Leave Settings in order to set up your organisation’s approval groups.

ESS3

The first step will be to click on Add Group. This will allow you to tell SimplePay who will be applying for leave, and who will be approving it. When setting up who requests will be approved by, you will need to choose from one of four options for each group:

  • Single Approver – This person holds all the power. All requests get approved by them and them alone.
  • Any of – If at least one person on this list approves the leave, you’re good to go.
  • All of – Every single person on this list has to approve the leave request for it to be approved.
  • All in order – Each person on this list will be notified of the leave request only if the person before them in the list approved it.

Once you have selected which of these modes you want, you can click on the plus icon, select somebody from the list and then click Add. Repeat this process for each leave approver. Specifying who will request leave for this group works in the same way. Click on the plus, select the name and then click Add. Easy. To make things even simpler, if the whole company will be using the same leave approver(s), you can just select the company name from the drop down menu.

ESSgroups

Believe it or not, that was the hard part. From now on, your employees will be able to log into their own SimplePay account in order to view or download any payslips they have available or to submit leave requests.

To put in a leave request, employees can simply click on Requests and then Submit Leave Request. From there they can just select the days of leave that they want to request as well as the type of leave before clicking Confirm. After this there will be an option to record a personalised message that will be seen by whoever is approving the leave.

ESSrequest

As soon as they click Save, an email will be sent to the appropriate leave approver(s), notifying them of the request.

ZA MSG RCV2

 

This email will contain a link to the Approval tab, which will allow yourself or the appointed employee to either approve or deny the request, along with a comment.

ESSapprove

So there it is. Getting the go ahead for that dream get-away has never been easier. If you can think of any way that we can make this process even simpler, please feel free get in touch with us and let us know.

waving