Product updates

Also in the second holiday month of August 🍹, our development team continued to work hard on our Epix platform. And as a result, Epix contains many new features, which we showed in our most recent live demo. Next to that also the first building blocks of our employee self-service are starting to take shape.

‍Curious about the most recent features and what’s coming next? Keep on reading!

General topics and improvements 💄

• Our Azure environment was already very secure but we added even some more security hardening (eg using 2FA to access some crucial Azure components).
• In the fly-in of an Epix user, the 'active' flag was always enabled, even for inactive users. This is solved.
• A workschedule that is in use is now readonly.
• On the home screen, we only show the processes with a due date <30 days like the other widgets.

HCM payroll code connection🌍

We've added new functionality that enables us to translate a generic payroll code like 'Vacation, Sickness, ... ' from an HCM system to a local payroll code. On import, our system will check if the 'external code' is linked to a local payroll code, depending on the contract of the employee. If that is the case, Epix will translate the generic code to a local code that will be used in communication with the payroll provider.

No more manual conversion of global codes to local codes!

Person🧑& Contract 💼

Person

• We added a filterbutton on the people page to be able to show 'inactive' people' or 'people without a contract' separately.
• We renamed the 'Group employee number' to 'Person number'.

Contract

• It is no longer possible to change the employer after creation of a contract. Since a lot of configuration depends on the choice of employer, changing it after a contract has been created could cause serious problems so we blocked this.
• On the German specific tab, we added a date field to indicate when the parental status starts. This field is also exported to German payroll providers.

Pay components

• We’ve made some changes on the input of a pay component that is valid for only 1 month. As a result this component can now be entered with 1 simple action, making it much more efficient.
• The end date of a pay component is now automatically filled in, so you won't make the mistake to add a pay component for more than 1 month by accident.
• The import of pay components is changed to check for the HCM code (see above HCM payroll code connection).

Calendar

• We fixed a rounding issue showing the calender. Also the input of a decimal number of hours was sometimes an issue. This is solved.
• If a calendar entry was added where the result was 0 hours, due to configuration, then this record was shown. From now on, we hide records which contain entries with 0 hours.
• In a special case where there are no calendar corrections, the closure wizard gives an error. We solved this.
• We now show the user friendly description for the payroll codes in the collective calendar.

Car management 🚗

• We added 2 new fields to our company car : horsepower and % contribution.
• In the company car analytics graph the figures where not rounded showing a lot of numbers behind the comma. This is fixed.
• In some cases the mobility fly-in was broken. This is solved.
• On contract level we show the car category label instead of the category code.

Payroll closure localization 🔁

• If you change the entire work schedule in the past, this is now noticed as a correction in the closure process.
• The pay component changes of the current month are now also visible in the closure wizard.
• We did a small fix in the filename of the export containing the date of the export.
• In the wizard, the rounding of the total calendar hours was not totally accurate. This is fixed now.
• We made the type of closure mandatory because changing the type could break the rest of the wizard.
• The default selection of the closure contained too many people, now only the people belonging to the selected pay group are taken into account.
• If there are changes in the personal information of people that are selected for a closure, we do a re-check when clicking the finish button to make sure all people still meet therequirements that were set.

Analytics and reporting📊

• There are 2 new graphs in the workforce analytics (on the Demographics tab) related to ESG reporting: an overview of the disability of your workforce (where relevant) and the spread of nationalities.
• We added filters on the calculated data on contract level.

Import/Export 🔃

• We added the search for an external (HCM) code in the pay component import.
• When importing payroll codes, there are a few flags that are optional. We changed the default behaviour when they are not provided in the file to reflect what is generally expected.

Absence self-service ⛱ - released but not yet accessible for endusers

• We have created a user management for the employee self-service. You can link a person to his/her email address and they can logon. Epix sees that this user is a self-service user and will show the self-service instead of the HR module of Epix.
• HR sets the default language of the user, but the employee can change this in the profilepage settings.
• We show the actual calendar of Epix to the employee. If the employee has concurrent contracts with 2 calendars, the self-service calender will merge the 2 together as one view.
• HR has the possibillity to set a request policy where the configuration of a set of payroll codes is managed on how they should be presented and requested.
• HR can set manual events to set a balance on a certain day.
• On the home page we show the balances in a graph.
• We show the same balance overview to the employee as we show to HR.

Note: the absence selfservice is behind a feature toggle, meaning this is already released into production for every customer, but the buttons are hidden except in our demo environment. So if you want a preview or a demo of the current situation, please let us know and we will show you the current features!

Information about feature releases

Remember, the list above gives an overview of the features and bugfixes we released in the previous month. We release in a continuous deployment so we can even deploy multiple times a day if necessary where bugfixes have a high prio to be solved.

Every release goes to a development phase where the new feature is tested by hand. All the development tests are run to make sure we didn't break anything else. Then the release goes toe acceptance, where a huge set of user tests are done. When they are 'green' we deploy this version to production. Everything is just 1 approval step and no manual work!

What’s coming up?

Payroll closure localization 🔃

Specific localization and exports will be added continuously. 

Employee self service to request absences ⛱

The next few weeks we will focus on the next steps to be able to request absences. Our goal is to release the first version of our international absence self-service to customers by the end of the year.

Document management 📜

We are setting the first steps to start on document management. At first this will be backend work but in the upcoming months we expect the first screens to arrive. This is a building block that we need to be able to upload payslips in the future.

Register for our next Epix demo

If you are interested in an online demo of Epix, click here to register for our next webinar or here for a personal meeting and demo.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us. And remember, check our site for more insights in our unified processing or integrated analytics solutions.

‍

‍