21Apr

There’s a plan for every business: Introducing Indigo Attendance Essentials!

Software at its best makes your complex processes simple. With Indigo Attendance we address your staffing availability, rostering and clocking processes, but we wanted to make it even simpler for operations that don’t have a complex scheduling requirement but still want to track their employees’ hours.

That’s why our team worked hard to bring you Indigo Attendance Essentials – a new plan with the essential features needed to help businesses with their time and attendance management functions.

With the New Indigo Attendance Essentials plan, we’ll help your business get started on managing employee working hours without the hassle of setting a schedule or shift rota, enabling you to keep track of employee hours in an easy and efficient way.

Users wishing to subscribe to our Standard plan will benefit from everything included in the Essentials plan, along with scheduling, and shift management and patterns. Businesses after more advanced controls can subscribe to our Premium plan, which includes everything in the Standard plan along with costings, budgeting and awards and penalties approval. A full list of features for our different Indigo Attendance product offerings can be found here.

What’s even better is that we’ve made it possible to grow alongside you! Users can now request to upgrade from one plan to the next, unlocking more advanced features aimed at optimising their individual business needs.

Shireburn is always here to help keep you equipped with the tools you need to run your business efficiently and effectively.

29Mar

Introducing Indigo Target Attendance

We’re thrilled to announce that the Shireburn Team has been working hard to launch Indigo Target Attendance; a new Indigo Attendance feature aimed at helping you compare the hours your employees work versus the hours your employees are expected to work. What’s even greater is the fact that this comparison can be carried out over a longer period (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.), rather than just on a daily basis.

How does it work?

First and foremost, you would need to configure your Target Attendance profiles. These can easily be configured and tailored to individual business needs. A quick example of such profiles would be 40 hours over 7 days, or 20 hours over 7 days, amongst others. Once these profiles are set up, you would then need to assign your employees to the respective profiles and that’s it, Indigo Target Attendance will do the rest!

This feature caters for both employees working on a schedule, and those whose work is not scheduled. The system will automatically help you identify any abnormal clockings, by calculating the hours your employees work, versus the expected hours based on their Target Attendance profile. Calculation of hours worked is automatically extracted and verified too.

Indigo Target Attendance seamlessly integrated with Indigo Payroll, helping you reduce human error and manual inputting of data, while enabling you to automatically update your payroll at the click of a button.

18Mar

Periodic Payments in Indigo Payroll

What are periodic payments?

Periodic payments are payments or adjustments to an employee’s payroll that need to be carried out regularly, but not monthly. Such items can include director’s fees or quarterly allowances.

Did you know that you can set up periodic payments with Shireburn’s Indigo Payroll?

Users can set up these pay items to be triggered on specific days of the year. Each time this payment is automatically triggered, it is added automatically to the payroll under which it falls.

Does Shireburn’s Indigo Payroll carry periodic payments forward to the next year?

Yes! These pay items can be carried forward automatically for future years. If for example, a periodic payment is set on the 29th February, it will be automatically included in the next year on the 1st March, since leap years occur every four years.

25Feb

NEW: Assign and Clear Shift Patterns in Bulk

One of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks of many business is the shift planning process, especially assigning, editing and ending shit patterns to employees. Over the past few weeks, the Shireburn Team has made significant improvements in Indigo Attendance’s scheduler with the aim of improving your scheduling workflow.

Previously, shift patterns could only be allocated to or cleared from one employee at one go. With this new feature, we’re saving you time as it is now possible to assign and clear shift patterns to multiple employees simultaneously!

Simply navigate your way to the scheduler in Indigo Attendance, select the start date and choose which shift pattern you would like to assign or clear and which employees you’d like to action this for and you’re good to go. Once you are done your scheduler will be automatically updated with the information submitted.

18Feb

Indigo Feature Roundup 2021

As we enter 2022, we are taking some time to round up the top features released throughout 2021.

To ensure that our users have the best tools on the market to manage their payroll, attendance, and HR functions, our team regularly releases updates for Indigo. Besides giving the Indigo Suite a refreshed look, there have been numerous feature add-ons to our Payroll, Leave and Attendance modules.Here’s a look at what our team got up to last year.

Migrate to Indigo any time with our stress-free migration tool

You can now switch to Indigo as your payroll provider any time of the year, and your company’s employee data and year-to-date payroll data will be ready on Indigo from day one. This allows you to pick up where you left off, so there will be no need to recalculate any payrolls already completed for the year.

Regardless of whether you are using another local payroll tool or Excel sheets, our team will be able to get you up and running in no time. You can rest assured that, as per our ISO certified procedures, all your data will be handled with the utmost security and confidentiality.

Indigo Leave, simplified and enhanced

The first half of 2021 saw a number of enhancements and new functionality to Indigo Leave. These included enhancements to the leave approval window, including viewing and sorting options for pending leave requests, and a pop-up with details of who submitted the request and when it was made.

We have also simplified the process for carrying out slight modifications to leave requests. Instead of having to cancel the request and re-enter all the details, you can now cancel the original request and resubmit a new one with the new resubmit function in Indigo Leave – saving you the time and headache of going through the approval process again.

Increased flexibility for rewards and penalties

Indigo Attendance has supported the assignment of rewards and penalties to shift presets for a while now, but you can now also manually allocate custom rewards and penalties for individual shifts. This means you can appropriately compensate or deduct pay or time for an individual shift that an employee has worked.

What’s more, absence, late arrival, and early departure penalties can now be configured by two different methods: slicing and range.

New Clocking and Scheduler widgets

Portal users can now view their schedule and clocking data, as well as clock in and out of shifts directly from the portal instead of a device, thanks to the new addition of the Scheduler and Clocking widgets. As with all other punching data available on Indigo, the data from the Clocking widget is available in our various punch-related reports.

Added functionality for shift planning

You can now import schedule records via Excel spreadsheets directly into the system. The Import scheduler records function allows you to allocate schedule records, such as pre-approved overtime or exceptional shifts, by bulk.

We have made the Scheduler even more helpful at a glance by clearly labelling overtime shifts, and adding icons within individual cells for clocking data, remarks, and warnings. Simply hover over these icons to view the information. Moreover, our Shift Patterns feature has been enhanced to support patterns that are up to 600 days long.

Identify overlapping clockings easily

The Overlapping Clockings tag for Indigo Attendance will be assigned in cases where employee punches overlap each other, such as when clock-in times are duplicated. This allows you to identify such exceptions with ease and ensures any adjustments are done accordingly.

Added peace of mind thanks to new emergency contacts

If anything happens to an employee, you can now get in touch with their loved ones without having to hunt around for their details. Just check the Emergency Contact Details section in the Employee Profile to find their name, number, and relationship to your employee – and because we know how busy people can be, we have included a primary and a secondary contact.

Simplifying your reporting with new options

When it comes to Indigo Leave, we have introduced two new reports, which will allow you to get a better view on the leave accruals entitlements and balance:

  • The Leave Accruals Report
  • The Leave Situation Report
  • In Indigo Attendance we introduced several new reporting options to help you and your team oversee your staffing and operations:

  • The Employee Schedule Report
  • The Daily Schedule Report
  • The Attendance Reconciliation Report
  • Easily integrate with third party applications with Indigo’s extended API library

    We are continuously working on improving and expanding the Indigo API library. Over the last year we included the following APIs:

  • Employee Profile Image
  • Get Payslip
  • Basic Pays
  • Accounting Interface
  • Calculation Payment Detail
  • Calculation Employer Liability
  • Employee Pay Items
  • Create Pay Item For Employee
  • Update Pay Item For Employee
  • Pending Leave Requests Waiting Approval
  • If you’re interested in leveraging Indigo’s APIs, have your development team visit our developer’s portal and our developer’s help centre.

    Refined performance

    Our team routinely releases optimisations for Indigo to ensure that the performance of the platform is maintained. Some of these optimisations released over the past 12 months include:

  • Importing basic hours, overtime, and leave entries in the payroll screen
  • The loading times of dashboard widgets
  • Payroll calculation and finalisation
  • The recalculation process for attendance exceptions allocations in Indigo Attendance
  • The Send to Payroll functionality in Indigo Attendance
  • Continuous security checks

    We continue to enhance the overall security of the Indigo platform. Security fixes are regularly rolled out to ensure that your data is kept safe from attackers.

    26Jan

    Indigo Attendance Feature Alert: Reward and Penalties Approval

    The Shireburn team has been working on a new setting in Indigo Attendance to give employers an improved level of control over how rewards and penalties are applied to employees’ salaries. With this new feature, employers can delegate specific users to review entries, reducing the room for human error or tampering, whilst contributing to both employers’ and employees’ peace of mind concerning fair allocation of rewards and penalties.

    What’s new?

    The new feature gives users the option to set a Reward or Penalty to require approval. This means that when attendance exceptions are generated with a Reward or a Penalty requiring approval, these entries must be approved by a user who has approval rights. Attendance exceptions can be easily approved or declined by using the newly implemented buttons, which appear with all options available to approving users.

    Can every user approve attendance exceptions?

    Admin users have this right automatically assigned. In order for other users to be able to approve attendance exceptions, this permission must be manually assigned by an admin.

    What happens if I skip one exception?

    When the user clicks Send to Payroll, Indigo performs automated checks on all attendance exceptions and flags any entries that have not been approved or resolved yet, alerting the user to the specific entries and action required.