BambooHR | New Features and Updates Galore – BambooHR Blog

Whoa! Summer flew by and we’ve been terribly neglectful of announcing some of the awesome updates and new features of BambooHR.  Even though we’ve been quiet, we’ve been busy making things better for our customers.  But we’re also committed to doing a better job of announcing our exciting news to the world more frequently. 🙂

Here’s a quick overview of the things that have changed since our June 2nd product post:

New Features

• Links dashboard widget
  If you want a specific set of company links to show up for employees, go to Manage > Links and add some now.  These could be links to benefit providers, the company webmail login page, or whatever you want.  It’s a nice way for employees, especially new ones, to quickly get to the resources they need.
• Customize your Add a New Employee page
  We realized quickly that all of our customers add employees to BambooHR in different ways.  Some love to fill out all the information right away.  Others want to get a name and a hire date in there and worry about the rest later.  We’ve updated the Add a New Employee page so you can decide which fields you want on there and which you don’t.  Simply click the Customize View link in the upper right corner of that page, select the fields you want, remove the ones you don’t, and click Save.  It’s easy!  Please note that any changes you make affect all users with permissions to add new employees in BambooHR.
• Terminating employment
  To terminate an employee, look for the Take Action button when viewing an employee record.  That button reveals the “Terminate Employment” link.  Click that link and we take you to a page to fill out all the necessary information regarding the separation (only Termination Date is required).  Once you click save, we also mark the employee as Inactive and disable employee self-service access for that employee.  If you find you need to edit any of the fields related to terminations, you’ll find them on the Job tab.

Updates

• International addresses
  We added a Country field to the Personal tab.  If an employee lives outside the U.S., you can change the Country field to another country and the rest of the address fields update to support international addresses.
• International phone numbers
  Related to the Country field change, we also changed our phone number fields to be open, rather than forcing the standard U.S. format (XXX-XXX-XXXX).  This allows us to support international phone numbers.
• Custom fields
  We can now add mult-row text fields as custom fields.  What in the world is that?  It’s like the large text field you see on the Notes tab.  So we now support quite a few field types as custom fields (for most tabs on the employee record).  If you need a custom field added to track something special, let us know.  We’ve seen everything from boot size to favorite candy bar!
• Terminating benefit coverage
  If an employee is enrolled in a benefit, there is now an action to Terminate Coverage for that employee.  You can future date the termination if you wish.
• Employee self-service
  We revamped the look and feel of Employee Self-Service.  Some things got swapped around and many of the Dashboard widgets received a face lift.  Employees now have a much better view of their information.  Plus, you can customize the Dashboard to display only those widgets you want them to have.  To change what employees can see, go to Permissions and click on the Groups tab.  Then click Edit next to Employee Self Service.  The new look is hot and the functionality of ESS is only getting better!
• Emergency contacts
  Speaking of hotness, we updated the look and feel of the Emergency Contacts tab.  The information is displayed more like business card, which should make it easier to read.  We also support international phone numbers and addresses in these fields now.
• Pay change reason
  One of our prospective customers suggested we add a list of reasons for pay changes to the Compensation table on the Job tab.  We thought it was a great idea.  You can manage the list of reasons and even create reports that group pay changes by reason.
• Recent Activity
  We updated the Recent Activity widget on the Dashboard to track who added the file or employee or report.  We also made the module more compact and added some pagination so you can browse backward in the history of things added to BambooHR.