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).

Hi there 👋

We’ve made a small update to how carry forward works in Timetastic — just to make things clearer and more accurate.

Until now, you could choose to have carried-over leave expire after 1–12 months. But behind the scenes, setting 12 months actually meant the leave never really expired.

To make that clearer, we’ve introduced a new option - Carry forward never expires

You can set carry forward to expire after any period between 1 and 12 months as before, or choose “Never” if you don’t want it to expire.

Anyone currently with a 12 month expiry will be switched to have "Never" expire to match how the old feature worked. But if you'd prefer an expiry on carry forward? You can still set 1–12 months by going to your carry forward settings.

We've also given some TLC to the calendar summary page to make it clearer how much carry forward is available at any point:

If you are in the carry forward period you might see the following, letting you know how much carry forward you have, and when it needs to be used by:

After the carry forward period you might see this, indicating any carry forward that was not used:

We're updating the help centre with more details on this.

Thanks to one of our API users reaching out with a bug on the absence endpoint. GET requests with parameters in the query string (as you'd expect) should work fine now. Huge apologies for this, we should have caught it and we're improving our API test suite as a result.

We're also updating some backend security things as we do from time to time, you shouldn't notice anything different here though.

We've just pushed out a couple of fixes:

A fix for the wallchart filter which we had reported. Users who are approvers of people in other departments can now see those users on the wallchart. (regardless of privacy settings, as they're approvers).

Changing price plans (Business to Pro or back again) now reflects in your audit log.

We've got more on the way. Stay tuned!

Hot on the heels of monthly reporting, today we've sorted an issue where times for half days were incorrect in the absences API endpoint. 

We've also rolled up a fix to the "What's new" widget in the footer so it works now.