Important Notices & Breaking Changes v12.10

The enhancements described in the related pages below represent significant functional changes that you must be aware of prior to upgrading to this release. Some of these enhancements require specific actions before or immediately after upgrading and are therefore highlighted here for your reference. Please refer to the relevant sections of this What’s New Guide, as identified below, for detailed information about each enhancement and any configuration that is required.

Rates and Rules Bulk Rate Update Issue

When using the Bulk Rate Update feature in the Rates and Rules module to update rates, a Rates Valid On Or After filter is available in the export screen to limit the rates that are to be exported for updating so that only those rate that are valid on or after a given date will be exported. However, an issue with this filter means that rates will be exported irrespective of whether the rates are valid on or after the date that is selected in the Rates Valid On Or After field. That is, any rates that match all other filtering criteria that you specify will be exported even if they have a validity end date that is before the date that is selected in the Rates Valid On Or After field. This issue applies to all rate export types.

As a temporary workaround any rates with a validity period that ended prior to the relevant date can be manually deleted from the bulk rate export spreadsheet file after rates are exported. Care should be taken to ensure that you only delete the relevant rows based on their validity end dates.

This issue will be fixed in a future maintenance release.

Leave Taken Deduction Rule Entitlement Balance Condition Change

The behaviour of the Sufficient Entitlement Balance condition on leave deduction rules for leave taken has changed whereby on upgrading to v12 the condition will partially pay leave taken if a payee has an insufficient entitlement balance to cover the entire duration of leave taken. Read more here.

Security Role Changes

We have split out some of the security permissions that impact the Candidate Portal, to provide you with the ability to determine if some of the sections display in the record. We have also added a new item to display your Privacy URL in Candidate and or Client Portal. To maintain your Candidate Portal Users existing experience, on upgrade we will automatically tick any additional permission items to sustain their current view and edit abilities. Read more here.

Umbrella Company User Role

You may notice a new Security Role called Default Umbrella Company Role for an Umbrella Company User. This role has been automatically created in case an agency decides to utlise our Umbrella Company feature. An umbrella company is a company that employs a temporary worker (an agency worker or contractor), on behalf of an agency. The agency then provides the services of the worker to their clients. Umbrella companies typically do not find work for the workers they employ. This feature can currently only be used by the United Kingdom.

The User Type ‘Umbrella Company User’ is not available as an entity to use within Security Role configuration. Please DO NOT delete this security role.

Open

Custom Field Changes

Search Issue

Currently where you create a new custom field with a default value, and then search for the default via the related search screen, or run a call via an API, the system will not pick up results that match the default value.  In the v12.10 release, we have made a change to remedy this issue, to ensure that where default values are applied in a search screen or API call, the system will find these results. Please be aware that any reports will need to be re-factored to support where a Custom Field’s default value is used as a criterion.

Consolidation of configuration in Front Office

In Version 12 the configuration of all Custom Field elements, both front and back office, have been centralised and now reside in front office tables.  As such Custom Fields that were in back office for Billing Company, Debtor, Pay Company and Payee, have been moved and eh old tables will no longer be updated or maintained.  This change may cause downstream impacts for reporting where the report is querying the old tables: 

 If any of your reports are using the old tables to query Custom Fields, please refactor to the new tables.  If you have any questions on this change, please log a Support Ticket.”

Phone Number Change

Currently where a number is entered via the UI, we apply validations to check that the values entered are numeric, and the number of values meets the criteria for a phone number. We then cleanse to remove spaces and store it ready to support SMS services. As phone numbers can also be imported (for example via an API) in this release we have introduced logic to validate, cleanse and store the number. Where we are unable to validate, for example the number contains a non numeric character, the value will be stored and displayed, however it will be prepended by the double quote symbol as shown below:

“0403t88236

Where you see this in the system, you can either edit and add the correct number, leave it as it is, or remove where it is not a mandatory field. Please note as advised in the past BPME masking on phone numbers (where configured), will not apply as we need to store the values without spaces to support SMS services. We are aware that users would prefer to see numbers masked, and we are looking for a solution that will support this in the future.

API 3.1.0 Breaking Changes

Job Template  

Method: GET  

A change has been made to the JobTemplates API so that the Job Template Status is exposed as part of the result set. Your integration may be impacted by this change depending on how you are retrieving data and schema validations or serializing to objects with older schema.

User

Method : POST

Fixed validation issue around the Mainaddress so at a minimum we will need a blank Mainaddress object to be provided.

Payee

Method: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT

Payee will only work with the 310 API for 1210 product. If you use the Payee API you will need to update your API path to /v310 once your product has been upgraded to v1210.