Introducing Civica HR & Payroll 5.15

Our latest major release for HR and Payroll is now available for install and will help our customers to do more and achieve even better outcomes through more connected ways of working. 

A comprehensive list of new features and enhancements can be found in the release notes which accompany this upgrade. Highlights include:

Absence Management

Enhanced options for calculating pro-rata time in hours for the bank holidays employees are not scheduled to work on. 

Company Maternity Pay 

Users now have the option to limit Company Maternity Pay and the Statutory Maternity Pay to ensure it does not exceed the employee’s normal salary: we have also allowed for a calculation based on employees on weekly contracts. Additionally, pay can be calculated in full or partial weeks and can allow the user to limit the periods of maternity being paid to the end of the Calendar month: only those weeks which are wholly within the calendar month would be paid.

Statutory Sick Pay

Options for how this is calculated have increased to include consideration for daily shift pattern changes as well as the employee's scheduled rota.

Reporting

Easily create reports using the Ad-Hoc Enquiry tool, now enhanced with a significant number of new fields for users to select from. When emailing a report users can now choose from a range of file formats - in addition to the standard PDF. For our schools and Academy trust customers, users can now produce a Single Central Record (SCR) report into excel format and customise the column headers. 

Application Mobility

We have been developing our mobile application to allow more functionality to be available via any device that connects to the core application. Absence and expense management along with the ability to “clock in and out” using GPS are all in our product roadmap for near-future delivery.

Employee Self Service

Our Self Service module has empowered users with access to more functionality through a browser, to take control of their data and progress tasks while balancing other priorities and we will continue to invest heavily into making sure the user experience and productivity evolves and improves.

Recruitment

We've been working on making the entire recruitment journey for administrators, managers and new recruits simpler and more engaging. Allowing recruiting managers more detail and control over the application information, with changes to shortlists feeding straight back to the administrators. Once an applicant is successful, the interaction between the manager and new recruit will begin before the join date, allowing them to view their teams, read policies and complete HR forms all via the e-Recruit module, making them feel part of the team as soon as the contract offer has been accepted.

Performance Management

Reviewing performance, setting objectives and general feedback is really important for production and employee morale. Self Service will be key in allowing the manager and employee to view, review and discuss performance and objectives, allowing them both to work towards the same overall goal.

Looking ahead to 5.16

5.16 is a mandatory release for Civica Payroll Software users and sees a significant number of legislative additions to. However, this is not simply a “Payroll release”: as a company we have identified areas which we know our users are asking us to improve on. In HR, for example, we will be opening up the conversation with our customers about how to improve our Performance Management offering. Every company implements this in a different way, and we’re keen to implement a solution that allows you to handle this using the Civica HR product.

In Time and Attendance, we will be releasing our updated mobile clocking app, allowing employees to “clock” remotely at known locations. Our e-Recruit and Bureau Portal solutions are getting significant make-overs and enhancements too, both products which can shoulder a lot of the burden that you may currently have when it comes to your daily operations. .

Finally, we are making it easy for you to get the data you need out of the software. The Ad-hoc Enquiry utility is getting an upgrade, to become the Enhanced Quick Enquiry. This allows you to choose any field in the system, and it now uses the field-level security so that you, or anyone you share the report with, can only see the data to which you have permission to see. In Self Service, we will also be introducing a report writer, allowing all users to produce quick and safe reports based on the employees they can access.