This one has been....quite heavily requested since we launched absence summaries 😅 so it's nice to bring it out into the open!

Admins can now restrict Absence Summaries to either Admins only or everyone. The toggle is in Settings > General with all the other privacy options: 

When it's set to Admins then everyone in the organisation who isn't an admin will have all email absence summaries turned off and won't be able to turn them back on: 

When it's set to Everyone we will not turn them back on - they'll stay off until users go back into Preferences and turn them back on again.

Mobile apps will also support this setting and we'll be rolling out updates as they go through approval in the app stores. 

In preparation for the new Rota product offering we've updated the terms to cover 3rd party sharing agreements.

The main changes are

• Adding Citation Group to our 3rd party processors list
• Adding Agendrix (part of Citation Group) to the 3rd party processors list
• Updating the Data Processing Agreement
• Updating the Data Protocol document

You can find the updated terms at https://timetastic.co.uk/legal/ 

We've addressed some issues with Outlook calendar syncs disconnecting and not updating bookings correctly - there's ongoing work behind the scenes on this which will be rolling out in the next couple of weeks which should make Outlook calendar syncs much better 🗓️

Also, a fix/improvement to the insights Annual trend graph:

Bookings spanning multiple months (maternity/paternity, sabbaticals, long term sickness for example) now show up in all of those months 🙌 and we're weighting bookings better so 8 bookings of 15mins doesn't show up as strongly as 8 users booking a week off. 

We've got lots planned for Insights in the future - stay tuned!

Just a small update to fix an issue where our full day events in Office365 weren't aware of the organisation's timezone so bled into the next/previous day if you were viewing another user's calendar in a different timezone. It's a bit niche but it matters!

This fix will only affect new bookings after this release.

API:

We've recently rolled out new API endpoints for updating/adding/removing Leave Types and Locked Dates.

We've also added UTC and work schedule corrected times to /absences and /holidays endpoints so you don't need to know the Organisation Timezone if you want to know the UTC date of a booking. 

Mobile app:

Android and iOS users will soon see an app update for Timetastic which shifts our mobile app onto a more robust and easier to update backend (hello Expo!). We've added no features to this release and just concentrated on bugfixes, some updates to stability and performance. 

Performance:

On the 9th March we rolled out an update to the Wallchart, Calendar and user list to improve loading speed by roughly 3 times. This made the biggest difference on the Wallchart as you can see on the graphs where we now return the majority of wallcharts in under 100ms: 

There's more to do on this - big wallcharts with lots of users and big user lists are still too slow. We're now serving over 1000 wallcharts per minute at peak time and our goal is for performance to only improve over time.

We've just made a couple of changes to the list of third-party services we use to help run Timetastic.

The main changes are:

1. We've moved our customer support over to Intercom, so Zendesk is no longer on the list.
2. We've added Churnkey, which helps us manage subscriptions.

As always, we have GDPR-compliant processing agreements in place with each provider. You can see the full list on our 3rd party apps page.

Thanks, and have a lovely week :)

We're continuing with quality of life improvements and trying to reduce friction. We hear you folks! For those of you who need to update everyone's work schedule in one go you can now do it from the multi select user menu: 

Handy if you've added all your users and not set your business hours quite right or if a whole department has changed their hours in one go.

Hi there 👋

We’ve made a small tweak to a couple of our reports to keep things nice and consistent.

What’s changed?

• In the Annual Report, Carried Into Next Year is now shown as a positive number, bringing it in line with the other columns.
• In the Individual Employee Report, both Taken and Carried Into Next Year are now reported as positive numbers too.

If you use any macros that rely on these columns, you may need to give them a quick update the next time you download a report.

As always, give us a shout if you have any questions 😊

— The Timetastic Team

If you've previously had a Timetastic account and want to come back (welcome 🙌) , or if you've got a couple of different Timetastic accounts and want to merge the users on them, this one's for you.

You can now upload your users from the backup report directly.

From the user uploader (https://app.timetastic.co.uk/users/upload) just attach your entire backup report. We'll check it's the right one, pluck out the users and add them to your Timetastic account. We'll set their allowances (both the type and the amount) from the sheet, set their leave years and off you go. 

No more re-jigging spreadsheets to match the upload format, just put the sheet in and we'll do the rest 🙂

While we were talking of uploads we changed the "invite all your users" checkbox to default to off. No more surprise emailing your entire company about Timetastic if you're still setting up!

If you've ever made a group booking and selected the wrong leave type, dates, or department then you'll know that deleting them as individual bookings can be a painful experience.

We think so too. So we fixed it. 🙌

Admins (and only Admins) can now delete group bookings in a couple of clicks just like any other cancellation:

You'll get a summary email detailing who the cancellation affected and the users will all get an email to say it's been cancelled too.

This will only affect group booking made from now - we don't have the data on older group bookings to link them together as one.

If you're an API user you'll see bookings now have a "GroupID" field - this is how you can tell if a booking is part of a group (from today).