This document describes the changes made to release 1.5.0 of PartnerHR to create release 1.6.0.

Silent Partner includes bug fixes and experience optimizations as a standard part of every PartnerHR release. These minor changes are not normally documented in the release notes, but this release has some fixes to issues that affected many users. We’ve included the “Important Fixes” section to highlight those changes.

In past versions of PartnerHR, users could not choose which columns to show or hide from the Profile Entries or Portfolio views.

In this release of PartnerHR, users can choose exactly which columns they want to see in these areas.

In past versions of PartnerHR, international date formatting (e.g. dd/mm/yyyy) was not supported. If users tried to enter a date using this formatting, they would receive an error.

In this release of PartnerHR, we have corrected this issue to support international date formatting

In this release of PartnerHR, we have renamed “Employee Types” to “Personel Types” to be more inclusive of the many different types of people you may have working with your organization (employees, volunteers, interns, or temporary, contracted team members).

We have addressed an issue where PartnerHR was not remembering the display users selected on the People page. If a user on the People page selected a display (e.g. Volunteers only), then navigated away from the People page, PartnerHR did not remember the display that user had selected. The next time that user went to the People page, they would have to re-set that display again.

PartnerHR now remembers the display users select on the People page, even after a user navigates away from the People page. If a user wants to clear the display they had selected, use the “Clear Filter” button to do this.

In past versions of PartnerHR, users entering employee information using special characters (e.g. ē) received an error message when saving this information.

In this release of PartnerHR, this has been corrected. Users can now use keyboard shortcuts (i.e. ALT + 0233) to enter accented characters, or right-click to select and save emojis when entering information into PartnerHR.

In this release of PartnerHR, we introduced improvements to PartnerHR’s calendar tool and email notifications.

When viewing the calendar in PartnerHR, it can be hard to see all entries for multiple employees. And for organizations with larger teams, many users only need to see their own team’s calendar entries, rather than seeing all entries for the entire organization.

We have improved the Calendar view in PartnerHR by allowing users to filter the calendar by Person, or by Department. Rather than having to look through the entries for all personnel, users can narrow the Calendar view to see just the people or department(s) they need to see.

Many organizations using PartnerHR also use an external calendar program as their team’s shared calendar for booking meetings, appointments, and managing daily tasks (e.g. an Office365 or Google Calendar). This means that when someone requests time off through PartnerHR, they must manually add the time off to their external calendar tool manually to make sure their time off is correctly reflected in their team’s shared calendar. If a user forgets to do this, or makes a mistake when entering this into their external calendar, their team will not be correctly informed of their availability.

In this release of PartnerHR, we’ve added the ability to add approved time off requests to external calendars with the click of a button! When a user receives the email notification that their Time Off Request has been approved, they can now click “Add to Calendar” to add the approved time off to their external calendar tool. This new feature supports Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook Calendar.

To use this helpful new feature, associate the “on Approval notify Employee for” Workflow Rule with any of your existing Time Off Templates.

This release of PartnerHR introduces the ability for personnel to enter time worked into your HR system. This can be used by employees to log overtime or time spent in training and professional development courses. This feature can also be used by volunteers to enter the time they have spent on their training and onboarding, or volunteering for your organization.

Employees can log their time from the PartnerHR homepage by clicking the plus icon next to the new “Time Entry” heading, and submitting the time entry with all the necessary details.

Once added, PartnerHR will automatically notify that employee’s supervisor to approve the time entry. When a time entry is approved, it is added to the employee’s Lieu Time Bank automatically!

Just as employees can log their time from the PartnerHR homepage, volunteers can also click the plus icon next to the new “Time Entry” heading to submit a time entry with all the necessary details. The Time Entry Type will automatically be set to “Volunteer,” and volunteers also have the option of selecting a Program or Event to associate their time entry with.

Note: your PartnerHR Admin user can create the list of volunteer Programs and Events using these new options in the Admin menu.

Supervisor users will notice some new options on their homepage for quickly accessing new time entry logs assigned to them for review.

PartnerHR now supports managing Time Off Policies based on a person's Employee Type. This allows you to handle different time off policies for different kinds of employees (e.g. full time or part time).

All Time Off Templates are enabled for all Employee Types by default, and you can adjust this as appropriate for your organization's needs. To use this new feature, your PartnerHR Admin can go to Admin > Templates. Click “Create New Template” to create a new one, or click the Edit icon for an existing Time Off template.

Then click "New Policy" to set the Time Off Policy according to your organization's needs.

Use the new "Policy Applies to" section to select which Employee Types this policy will be applied to. Once an Employee Type is selected for a Time Off Policy, that Time Off Policy will be applied to all employees of that type.

Important Notes for this enhancement:

This release of PartnerHR introduces the ability to add one or more custom fields to a template. Admin users can create new custom fields through the Configuration page (under the Admin menu > Configuration).

Once the custom field has been created, Admin users can add the custom fields to any templates, as needed. This ensures that the custom field(s) are available to users when an entry is created using that template.

We’ve added a new “Get Help” link to the PartnerHR homepage. Clicking “Get Help” takes you to the PartnerHR knowledge base so you can quickly access help guides and resources from the Silent Partner team.