What's new in Leave Balance
Recent product updates, in plain English. General releases go live for every account at the same flat price; early-access features are marked as such below.
Microsoft Teams: early access for selected organisations
Microsoft Teams is now in early access for a limited set of organisations, with bot commands for check-in, check-out, leave requests, and balance lookups directly inside Teams. This is not a public Store listing yet — we confirm tenant eligibility and the exact pilot scope with each organisation before enabling access. Request pilot details from the Teams page if you'd like to be considered.
See the Teams pilotRoster copy-week: preview before you publish
Copying last week's roster forward used to mean re-checking every assignment by eye. The new copy-week workflow now shows a full preview first — every shift it will create, every conflict it finds (double-booked employees, expired availability, existing assignments) — before anything is written. Choose how to handle conflicts, confirm, and publish. Nothing touches the schedule until you approve the preview.
Bulk leave grants and reversals get a proper audit trail
Granting leave to a filtered group of employees now previews exactly who will be affected and by how much before you commit — the same signed-preview pattern as the roster copy tool, so a bulk grant can't silently apply to the wrong set of people. Made a mistake after the fact? Reverse a grant or adjustment from the ledger in one click; reversing the same adjustment twice is a no-op, not a duplicate.
Shift and attendance reports: weekly compliance summary and full audit trail
Two new reports round out the reporting suite: a weekly shift-compliance summary that flags missed shifts, late starts, and unapproved swaps at a glance, and a full shift audit trail that records every assignment change — who moved it, when, and from what — for accounts that need to reconstruct a schedule after the fact.
Year-end: idempotent finalisation and automatic encashment payout
Running year-end twice by accident no longer double-processes anything — finalisation is now idempotent end to end. Employees who are due a cash payout for unused leave at year-end have it calculated and handed off to payroll automatically as part of the same finalisation step, instead of a separate manual export.
Notice-period pay-in-lieu now follows regional rules automatically
When an employee doesn't serve their full notice period, the pay-in-lieu calculation now uses the correct divisor for their region automatically, and snapshots it at the point the notice period is activated — so the figure stays reproducible even if regional settings change later.
Attendance regularization: employees fix their own missed punches
Forgot to clock in? Clocked out an hour late by accident? Employees can now raise a regularization request directly against the affected day — proposed time, reason, supporting note — and managers approve or reject from the same screen they already use for leave. Every change keeps a full paper trail of the original record, the requested change, the approver, and the timestamp, so the audit story holds up under ACAS, Fair Work, or any internal review. Email and Slack notifications fire on submission and decision, so nothing sits in a queue.
Read the deep diveAttendance notifications and monthly summaries
Late arrivals now trigger a real-time email and Slack DM to the employee and their manager the moment the grace period expires — no more end-of-week surprises. A daily check-in reminder lands at the start of each working day for anyone who has not clocked in, and a monthly admin summary email lands in the HR inbox on the first of every month with attendance, lateness, and absence trends across the account. Employees see the same data on a redesigned /my_attendance page with summary cards and a rolling chart.
Attendance calendar view
See every employee across every day of the month on one screen. The new month grid keeps the employee column sticky as you scroll, colour-codes each cell by status (present, late, absent, on leave), and lets you filter by location and department. Pattern reading replaces report-building — outliers, streaks, and unusual weeks jump out at a glance, with click-through to the underlying record when you need detail.
Read the deep diveAccount-level attendance settings, IP whitelisting, and self-service export
Attendance now configures once at the account level instead of per employee. Admins can lock check-ins to office IP ranges with the new IP whitelist toggle, switch on auto-approval for retroactive attendance fixes, and let employees export their own attendance history without raising a ticket. The defaults stay sensible; the controls are there when policy says they need to be.
Emergency contacts, profile completion, and the anniversary widget
Employees can record multiple emergency contacts on their profile — primary, secondary, whoever the situation calls for. A profile-completion percentage nudges teammates to fill in missing fields without HR having to chase. The dashboard now shows a rolling anniversary and birthday widget so managers stop missing the small moments that keep teams human.
Hourly time bank: per-pay-period accruals now running in production
Hourly time bank balances now accrue automatically on each pay period — biweekly, weekly, or whatever cadence your account is configured for. The job runs in production and is reconciled against payroll cycles, so balances move on payday instead of drifting until someone audits them. Teams running US-style PTO accruals or hourly leave banks get correct numbers without manual top-ups.