27th August 2020

Indigo 1.78.0.0 | Create shift patterns that suit your company's diverse work schedules

Marie Claire Saliba avatar
Written by Marie Claire Saliba
Updated over a week ago

Hello!

We are very excited to bring you Indigo version 1.78.0.0 today, replete with a brand new tool for creating shift patterns in Time & Attendance! The Shift Patterns page allow you to create and allocate work schedules that suit your company's needs.

Additionally, you will find that we have updated calculations for overtime tax concessions that satisfy particular employment circumstances and enhanced several other components of the platform.

Create fixed or rotational Shift Patterns for your diverse workforce

The Shift Pattern page in Indigo allows you to create an unlimited number of custom shift patterns for your diverse work schedules types, be they standard Monday-Friday schedules or complex rotational ones. This is a fantastic way to quickly build your company's different work schedules.

The page lets you insert your shift presets into the slots of the shift patterns. Just like adding shifts to your Scheduler, just click on an empty slot and type in the name of the shift to add it to the pattern.

Pattern sizes can be adjusted, too. This caters to a wide variety of rotational shift schedules.

Once you've saved your shift patterns, go to your Scheduler and type in the name of the pattern to allocate them to your employees. The pattern will repeat in your Scheduler. You can end a pattern at any time by clicking on the context menu of a shift and selecting Clear pattern from this day forward.

You can easily make adjustments to an allocated shift pattern by replacing, cutting, or editing shifts within the pattern. Future iterations of the pattern will not be affected by changes made to isolated instances.

Here are some helpful articles to get you started with shift patterns:

Updates to the OT concession tax calculations**

The OT concession tax exemption option gives you the ability to exempt certain employees from the new taxation rate introduced in the 2020 budget for the first 100 hours overtime of the year for workers earning less than €19,500 and not in managerial positions. This option was implemented in Indigo at the start of the year.

We have modified this provision in today's Indigo update in order for the system to properly handle particular caveats to this 2020 Malta budget measure. The following has been done:

  1. Calculations cater for situations where employees are exempted from the OT concession tax mid-year. For employees who are opted out of the OT concession tax, their tax paid to date is equivalent of their FSS tax + OT tax.

  2. When re-calculating payrolls, the system will appropriately calculate employees' taxes and gross pay according to the OT tax concession and employment type statuses set historically during the given pay period.

  3. The sum of all taxes (OT + share options + FSS + other) is capped at 50 percent of the employee's gross pay value. In cases where the sum of taxes does exceed the 50 percent sum, the FSS tax is adjusted or reduced to fall within the limit.

Indigo Payroll enhancements

  • Apostrophes in employee e-mail addresses are now supported.

Indigo Payroll fixes and improvements

  • We have updated calculations for Overtime concession tax in the system according to the guidance of the CFR. Please consult our article about OT concessions tax for more information.

  • Payslips can now show unpaid working hours (basic hours with 0 rate).

  • Employees' assigned departments, sections, units, and grades now appear in their merged payslip report. If an employee is not assigned to any of these aforementioned fields, the fields will not appear in the merged payslip report.

  • We fixed an issue where the export functionality in the leave history tab of the leave audit request page was being blocked when filters were enabled.

  • OT concession tax improvements in supporting non-SSC employees.

  • Generating a leave history report works as expected when only the approved leave box in the report setup panel is ticked.

  • Purchasing license updates totaling less than €10 will no longer cause any errors in the system.

  • We fixed an issue where the leave situation report was ignoring the section/unit IsNotEqualTo filter applied in the grid.

  • When printing all payslips in one print job, the employment and termination dates of the employees appear on the payslips as expected.

  • There were some cases where the basic hours and paid leave off values were being reported differently in payslips, a result of a rounding issue. This has been fixed and both rates are identical as expected.

  • Generating a summary version of the maternity leave fund report shows totals by grouping instead of by employees (detailed).

  • An error has been fixed in the system that was allowing users to finalize a payroll without re-calculating pay items imported via excel.

  • Some fixes to the payslip password protection setting have been made. First, the system will not default to a random password for the employee's payslip if the password field is left blank. Second, you are able to completely delete payslip passwords for employees (even with the payslip password protection setting enabled).

  • Entitlements for public holidays show correctly in the leave situation report as expected.

  • Annual projected tax is reported as a rounded figure in the i information pop-up window in the payslip preview panel as expected.

Indigo Time & Attendance enhancements

  • The Shift Patterns page is now available in Time & Attendance and you can create patters longer than 7 days.

  • When terminating an employee, the shifts showing in the Scheduler for that employee will be flagged with warning labels, helping you to identify which shifts to remove from your Scheduler.

Indigo Time & Attendance fixes and improvements

  • Speed performance of the calculate costs functionality in the Scheduler has improved.

  • The negative sign for absence balances in the allocation return report is placed in front of the hour value (-HH:mm) as expected.

  • Only records within the range specified by the user appear in the allocation return report as expected.

  • We fixed a bug that allowed declined sick leave requests to be imported into the Scheduler.

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