New features in Replicon

Timesheet

• Daylight Savings Time support

Time off

• Automatic updates to bookings when schedules change
• New options for approvals are routed when time off bookings are edited
• Fixed-week options for bi-weekly accruals
• New ways of adding holiday bookings

Punch & Mobile

• Mandatory Custom Fields punch validation rule

Project, Billing, & Costing

• Revenue Workbench
• Multiple invoice templates

Time & Attendance

• Compliance Dashboard

System

• SSO with OpenID Connect
• Mandatory MFA usage option
• Self-serve setup of email MFA
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Multi-lingual notifications
• Increased character limit for certain text fields
• Password strength enforcement
• User profile audit log

Daylight Savings Time support

Daylight Savings can be confusing. When you’re dealing with timesheets, it may be difficult to know whether the total number of hours worked was calculated correctly.

In the past few weeks, we finished implementing some changes to configurable timesheets that help ensure you remain pay compliant when time changes.

Now, in a punch or in/out timesheet:

• During the spring change when an hour is lost, if a user records an entry that falls between 2:00 am and 2:59:59 am (the missing hour), we’ll automatically correct the time. For example, 2:30 am will be updated to 3:30 am.
• During the fall change when an hour is repeated, if a user manually records an entry that falls between 1:00 am and 1:59:59 am (the repeated hour), the user will see a prompt, asking if the entry falls in Daylight Savings (DT) or Standard (ST) time.
  
  
  For example, 1:30 am could be 1:30 DT (the first occurrence of that hour, before the time change) or 1:30 ST (the second occurrence of that hour, after the time change).

  

  Note: Times recorded via actual punches do not require prompts, since the system knows exactly when those punches were made.

We’ve also updated all of our default pay rules to ensure Daylight Savings changes are taken into account. Plus, coming soon, you'll see an icon between in and out times or punch pairs whenever Daylight Savings alters a segment length, warning you that times shown will therefore not add up to the actual segment duration.

Whether these changes apply to a user is determined by the time zone set on the Schedule tab of their user profile.
Note:

• To make it easier to audit punch timesheets that include Daylight Savings punches, we recommend setting the employee's time zone to display on timesheets – this is configured on the user's Settings page and can be made the new user default. With this setting, you can easily see whether punches were made in DT or ST. (Time zones don't show on in/out timesheets.)
• These changes are not yet supported by in/out timesheets in Replicon Mobile

Automatic updates to bookings when schedules change

We’ve launched the improvement to time off we previewed on Nov 21.

Now, if you’re using new time off, whenever you change a schedule and that change impacts the duration of a time off entry or booking, the time off duration will be automatically updated to match the new schedule.

Note that anyone still on the legacy version of time off will still have to make these kinds of updates manually.

Refer to What happens if we update an employee’s schedule for a day when they have time booked off? for more information.

New options for approvals are routed when time off bookings are edited

We’ve introduced two new global options on the Time Off Settings page that determine how timesheet and time off approvals are handled whenever a time off booking is edited.

One option relates specifically to approvals after a schedule is modified (related to the Updating time off when schedules change update described above).

The other setting applies when any time off booking is edited: Previously, by default, only fully approved timesheets would reopen for re-approval when a related booking was edited. Now, you can choose to have even partially-approved timesheets reopen.

This new option ensures timesheet owners and approvers have the opportunity to view modifications to the timesheet – such as new validation errors that might have arisen as a result of edits – every time a booking is edited.

See Defining how approvals proceed when bookings are reopened for more information on these options.

Fixed-week options for bi-weekly accruals

We’ve added a new option that might interest you if you use bi-weekly time off accruals, and:

• You want accrual dates to match for all users, or
• You want to ensure accruals are always two weeks apart even when assigning multiple policies to one user

Here’s what we’ve changed: You can now assign a fixed, known accrual schedule when setting up a bi-weekly accrual rule – one not based on the policy's start date. There are two fixed-week options, so you can choose exactly when accruals fall:

• Week 1, based on the reference week of July 1, 2018
• Week 2, based on the reference week of July 8, 2018

For example, if you assign a user Week 1 in their policy, time off can accrue during the week of July 1st, 15th, 29th, Aug 5th, etc, in 2018 (provided the policy is in effect on the accrual dates).

If you don’t need accruals to occur on a fixed, predictable schedule, you can leave the existing option in place, which bases the accrual week on the policy start date.

Please refer to Adding default time off accrual policies for more information on these options.

This new option is available in new time off only. And note, as a result of this change, we’ve renamed the old On Week field to On Day of Week.

New ways of adding holiday bookings

Bookings need to be added to holidays to ensure payroll is calculated correctly.

We’re now offering some new methods for adding holiday bookings, that make managing bookings easier and more flexible.

These can be used in conjunction with or instead of our existing holiday auto-population feature, that adds bookings to timesheets when they’re generated.

These new options will be most useful to you if:

• You need to correct existing holiday bookings that include errors, or
• You want to make scheduling plans for the future, so you need to see all bookings before timesheets are generated

Administrators can now mass add holiday bookings:

• When adding a new holiday
• When editing an existing holiday
• For individual users, via their user profiles

In addition, administrators will receive notification when bookings have been added, with details of any errors that arose, so they have full visibility regarding updates.

Plus, payroll managers can now view, edit, and delete holiday bookings from a new Payroll > Holiday Bookings tab. This option may be especially useful in mass deleting error bookings before mass re-populating.

These changes are available to anyone with a product that includes time off. So, time off only customers – who do not have access to auto-population – can now easily manage their holiday bookings.

For more information, refer to Adding multiple holiday bookings at once.

Mandatory Custom Field punch validation rule

We’ve added a new default punch validation rule – Mandatory Custom Fields Validation. This rule can be used to ensure users fill out punch custom fields when creating punches, or on their punch timesheet.

With this rule, if the custom fields you indicate are ‘required’ are left blank, a validation will display on the user’s timesheet. You can set up validations to block timesheet submission, if desired.

Revenue Workbench

If you’re looking for a simple solution for managing your revenue and complying with IFRS 15 and ASC 606, take note. Our Revenue Workbench is now available.

Revenue recognition is a common accounting procedure that officially accounts for revenue earned. So, for example, you can recognize revenue you earn while a multi-year project is in progress, even if you won’t be paid until it is complete. This way, you can give your shareholders and investors accurate reports and forecasts on your financial status at any point in time.

With our Revenue Workbench, you can:

• Use revenue contracts that exactly match your requirements to automatically calculate recognizable revenue

• Easily apply and customize contracts for specific projects
• Filter and view auto-calculated recognizable revenue for each project or client, as of any date
• Select revenue to recognize and create a ‘revenue run’; you can recognize just a portion of the recognizable revenue, if desired
• Mark a revenue run as complete, and export it to your ERP system

To take a look at the Revenue Workbench, enable all ‘revenue’ permissions in Administrator, Project Manager, and Revenue Manager permission sets.

Revenue recognition is available in our Professional Services Automation product only. Refer to Understanding revenue recognition in Replicon for more information.

Multiple invoice templates

Do you need different invoice templates for different purposes – say, one for your US customers, and a different one for your Canadian customers? Now you can create multiple invoice templates in Replicon, each for use with a different client or type of clients.

Then, when creating an invoice, users can choose which template applies.

Plus, you can now choose a custom accent color for use on templates, to help differentiate templates and to better match your company’s branding.
Refer to Setting up invoice templates for information on configuring templates.