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New Feature: Managing End of Service in Bulk

With the spread of COVID-19 globally, we decided 2 weeks ago to transition our entire team to remote work. It was a bit daunting at first, but we’re grateful to be able to say it’s largely business as usual again at SimplePay (albeit with a bit more distance between us and significantly more Zoom meetings every day).

With that in mind, we have been hard at work to ensure we reduce the burden on employers and payroll administrators where possible. We have introduced new functionality to allow users to manage their employees’ services in bulk. A new Employee Actions section has been added to the Bulk Actions page to allow users to do the following for their employees in bulk:

  • End Service
  • Reinstate
  • Undo End of Service

This new bulk functionality allows you to manage multiple employees’ services in one place on SimplePay without requiring you to navigate to each employee, one at a time.

To learn more about how this functionality works, head over to our help page here.

For larger companies we recommend limiting this bulk functionality to batches of 50 employees to ensure smoother results.

If you have any questions, please contact our support team.

Team SimplePay

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Automatic Logout Feature

We are happy to announce a new security feature as part of our ongoing commitment to protecting your data and helping you stay safe online. We already have the highest of security standards in place, and last year we introduced an optional 2-factor authentication feature to prevent access to your account if someone has your password. Now, our optional timeout feature allows you to choose how long the system can be left idle for before automatically logging you out of SimplePay.

With this new feature, if you forget to log out of SimplePay, the next person that uses that computer or electronic device will not have access to your account. This is especially beneficial to you if you share computers in the workplace, if you work on public computers or if you are concerned that someone will use your electronic device when you leave it unattended.

To access this feature:

  • Go to the Profile icon and select User Profile
  • Click on Lock screen after timeout
  • Select a timeout option:
    • If you select ‘Disabled’, you will not be logged out of the system, no matter how long a page has been left idle for.
    • If you select a time from the menu (e.g. ‘1 hour’), it means that the system will log you out if there has been inactivity for the time specified.
  • Click Save

Just another way that SimplePay is helping you take care of your sensitive employee data.

Team SimplePay

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QuickBooks Integration Upgrade

As the year draws to a close, our holiday elves have been bustling behind the scenes to enhance your payroll experience, focusing on our QuickBooks integration. SimplePay integrates with both QuickBooks and Xero, allowing you to send your payroll information straight from SimplePay into your general ledger accounts with the click of a button. This means that you do not have to switch between systems to transfer information, saving you time and reducing the possibility of human error.

You’ll be happy to hear that our QuickBooks integration has been refined to give you an upgraded user interface and setup. These improvements will make the process easier to navigate and simpler to understand if you wish to integrate your payroll and accounting information.

If you have already integrated QuickBooks and SimplePay in the past, please note that you may be required to re-authenticate your account due to the work done behind the scenes.

For more information on integrating SimplePay with QuickBooks, head on over to our help page.

Team SimplePay 

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New Live Chat Support

We’re making it even easier for you to get the support that you need with the introduction of our live chat functionality. When logging into the SimplePay system, a new icon now appears in the bottom corner that allows you to initiate a live chat with our friendly support team.

This means that you can start a chat from any area in the system while capturing payroll and get the answers that you need. To send our support team a message, simply click on the chat icon, type your message and press enter.

Please note that while we strive to minimise our response times, these may vary during peak times. If the chat indicates that the team will only be back tomorrow or Monday, please do not hesitate to send us a message and we will respond as soon as we return to the office. Alternatively, our comprehensive help site is also always available for more information.

If you have a longer query, you are of course still welcome to send this to our support team via email at [email protected]

We look forward to helping you!

Team SimplePay

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We’re App Partner of the Year Finalists

SimplePay is delighted and proud to announce that we have been chosen as a finalist for the App Partner of the Year: South Africa for the Xero Awards taking place in March 2020. Xero is the leading cloud-based accounting software in the market and we are honoured to be recognised for our integration and synergy.

As SimplePay uses the same approach to Xero integration in all our regions, you can be assured that you are receiving the same quality features no matter what region you are in. We aspire to be finalists in all regions when these awards are announced in the future. 

A huge thank you to our wonderful team. Your dedication and commitment to making SimplePay the best cloud-based payroll system for our customers has made this possible. And of course, an even bigger thank you to our customers. Without your support, loyalty and feedback, we wouldn’t be what we are. We look forward to continuing to serve your payroll needs.

To find out more about SimplePay’s integration with Xero, head over to our help page here.

Team SimplePay

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New Feature: Employee Leave Expiration

Introducing the latest system expansion from the SimplePay team: employee leave expiration for leave days carried over.

With our aim to give you the ultimate payroll experience, you can now customise your leave settings even further by specifying how long leave carried over from a previous leave cycle remains valid for. For example, you might have a policy that any unused leave from 2019 may carry over to 2020, but if it is not used by the end of June 2020, it will expire and be forfeited.

This is usually done to ensure that your employees’ leave does not excessively accumulate. In addition, by prompting employees to take their leave in due course, it leads to increased employee well-being which has long-term benefits for both employees and the company. Before implementing this on the system, ensure that it aligns with your company’s leave policy and your employees’ contracts to avoid any labour disputes.

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To make use of this new feature on current policies, follow these easy steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Leave.
  2. Click on View next to the leave type that you wish to edit.
  3. Under Available Entitlement Policies, click on View next to the entitlement policy that you wish to edit.
  4. If the Allow leave to be carried forward to next cycle? checkbox is set, there will now be an additional line that appears under it.
  5. In the new field , enter the number of months that leave must be held for before expiring.
  6. Click Save.

If you are creating a new leave policy, you will be able to follow the same process when creating the entitlement policy.

For more information on creating and editing leave entitlement policies, head over to our help page here.

Team SimplePay

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New Self-Service Features

We have been working on expanding our self-service functionality recently and are pleased to announce that we have added two new features. These changes allow you to disable different types of self-service requests (i.e. leave and / or info update requests). You’re now also able to hide leave balances for all or some of your leave types.

You can make these setup changes by navigating to Employees > Self-Service > Settings and then selecting either General or Leave from the drop-down menu.

To disable self-service request types, select General from the menu and select whichever types of requests you would like to disable for self-service. Once you’ve done this, self-service users won’t be able to submit any new requests for the type you disabled.

To hide leave balances, select Leave from the menu and uncheck the leave types for which you would like to hide the balances. After you’ve done this, self-service users won’t be able to see their leave balances for the specific leave type, but will still be able to submit requests.

We hope that these new features improve your payroll processing experience. 

For more information on how to make these changes, please refer to our help site pages here or contact our support team.

Team SimplePay

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Override Payslip End Dates in Bulk

We are happy to announce the release of a new feature that allows you to override payslip end dates in bulk. This feature is used to extend or shorten the payment period for a specified payslip.

This feature is particularly useful for companies that have an annual shutdown and pay their employees upfront for the period that they are on leave. Of course, overriding payslip end dates in bulk is not exclusively for annual shutdowns and this feature can be used in various contexts.

For more information on how to use this bulk action, refer to our help articles:

We hope that this new feature enhances your payroll processing experience. If you have an annual shutdown in December, be sure to bookmark this blog post for use later in the year.

If you need any further assistance, please reach out to our support team.

Team SimplePay

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Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

Sometimes small changes make a big difference, so you may spot some modifications that we have made to leave.

  • A new report

We have added a new report called Leave Days Report. This report shows the specific days that employees have taken/will take leave for the specified leave type and period. It complements our current Leave Report, which shows you the total number of leave days taken during the period, made up of the individual days shown on the Leave Days Report. This added leave report will simplify your payroll duties, as you can confirm leave dates with employees or managers. It is also useful in the management of employees and communication with other departments.

  • Visual tweaks to entitlement policies

We have made it clearer to see whether or not an employee is on the default company leave policy. When going to an employee’s profile and clicking on Leave > Entitlement Policies > Edit, (company default) will now display next to the leave policy if the employee is on the company’s default policy. In addition, we have updated the heading to display as Active Entitlement Policies.

You can still see the company default policy by going to Settings > Leave > View (next to the leave type) and scrolling to the bottom. However, we have changed the heading to Active Entitlement Policies (company defaults) to align with the changes made in the employees’ profiles.

We hope that these small changes will make a big difference in your payroll experience. If you need any help with leave management, refer to our help page here. For more information on reports, click here.

Team SimplePay

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Bulk Actions for Once-off Payslips

We are happy to announce that we have increased our bulk actions functionality to include bulk actions for once-off payslips. If you have multiple employees with once-off payslips and need to add items to these payslips, you can now do so in bulk by going to Employees > Bulk Actions.

From here, you can select either Payslip Inputs or Clocking Imports. Then click on Switch to once-off payslips and capture your data accordingly. Please take note of the following:

  • Payslip Inputs: As always, only once-off items (i.e. no regular items) can be added to once-off payslips.
  • Clocking Imports:  Only custom items with Payslip Inputs are supported for this method.

To read more about these functions, the following help pages are available:

Bulk Actions

Clocking Imports

If you need further assistance with this new functionality, please contact our support team.

Team SimplePay