Release notes — 4 September 2024

Learn about any known issues in this release.

We have also released some enhancements in MyCascade. For more information head to our dedicated MyCascade help centre.

HR | Payroll | Scalability and infrastructure

IRIS Cascade Assistant

After a successful testing period, we are happy to announce the release of IRIS Cascade Assistant to all customers.

IRIS Cascade Assistant is a chatbot designed to understand your questions and retrieve answers from our Help Centre. Learn more about how IRIS Cascade Assistant will improve how you access help information.

Accessibility

  • Language tags: Language tags have been added to allow assistive technology users discover the language of a page. This is part of our ongoing project to make IRIS Cascade meet accessibility guidelines.

  • Admin > Working calendar: Accessibility and design changes have been implemented on the working calendar preview in Admin. These improvements mirror the changes made to the planner area in a previous release and are aimed at making IRIS Cascade more accessible for all users.

HR

Enhancements

  • Comments in Absence details: In Absence details, the comments box has been moved onto the bottom of the page instead of a separate page. The comments box only appears when the absence is set to By Request.

    This reduces the number of user actions needed and to streamlines the absence request process.

    This is part of the ongoing improvements to Absence details.

Fixes

  • A fix has been applied to the Task List Summary dashboard chart, as the column headers were not spanning the entire length when no tasks were visible.

Payroll

Enhancements

  • Integration > Salary & Pay: Integrate multiple salary changes.

    The release of Integrate multiple salary changes has been delayed.
    This feature will no longer be included in the September release. We are now looking to include this in the October release.

  • New Starter Mistimed Payments

We have introduced new functionality for the payment of New Starter Mistimed Payments.

When an employee starts late in a pay period, they may miss the payroll cut-off date, and be paid for this work in the following period. As per HMRC rules, the payments must be split for National Insurance purposes.

Example

An employee starts on 26th September and has missed the payroll cut off date. Therefore, the pay for September will be combined with the October payment.

If the employee is due to be paid:

  • £500 for September

  • £2,000 for October

    The full amount of £2,500 would be paid in October.

For National Insurance purposes, there would need to be two calculations. One for £500, and one for £2,000.

Previous calculation method

Currently, IRIS Cascade would calculate the full pay period on £2,500 and National Insurance would be as follows (For an employee on National Insurance Category A):

  • Employees NI (£2,500 – 1048) * 8% = 116.16

  • Employers NI (£2,500 – 758) * 13.8% = 240.40

New calculation method

With mistimed payments, two calculations are made for the October payroll run to account for the mistimed payment:

  • Employees NI (£500 – 1048) * 8% = 0.00 (£2,000-1048) *8% = 76.16

  • Employers NI (£500 – 758) * 13.8% - 0.00 (£2,000-758) * 13.8% = 171.40

Learn how to Edit New Starter Mistimed Payments.

Fixes

  • Fixed issue which prevented webhook from sending successfully when Exclude from Expenses Plus field was in use.

  • Fixed issue with elements selected to be payments after leaving not saving.

Scalability and infrastructure

  • We've improved the way Expenses Claims loads and saves data, improving the overall performance.