What's New in HROffice 7.5?

What’s New in HROffice 7.5?

Ascentis’ HROffice 7.5 offers new tools for compensation management, updates for changes in federal reporting regulations, and technology improvements that increase report generation performance and faster, easier and more frequent product upgrades.

TOOLS FOR BETTER EMPLOYEE RETENTION:

HROffice’s new compensation management functionality allows HR to compare compensation plans within the organization and in the broader market through various analysis tools and modeling features.

HROffice users can now define key components of a company’s compensation policy within the system by creating an unlimited number of compensation plans with associated pay grade levels. This functionality builds the framework needed to accurately analyze and adjust plans that drive more equitable compensation practices throughout an organization.

The powerful new “What If” modeling tool reveals the true impact of proposed pay changes. With this tool, HR can accurately analyze how changes to three compensation variables affect key metrics like compa-ratio, or determine just how much a 5% pay raise really is.

The modeling variables available are:

• Compa-ratio: Enter a target compa-ratio figure to see how much of an increase in pay would be required to reach that compa-ratio target.
• Percentage Change: Move the percentage-change slider bar to see how proposed percentage increases affect pay rates or an employee’s compa-ratio.
• Pay Change: Simply enter a proposed pay raise to see how the other metrics and calculations are affected.
• HROffice now provides compa-ratio calculations for employees within a company-defined compensation plan -- critical for budgeting and employee career advancement planning.
• With the new Pay Grade Detail, Change and History reports, HR can take a closer look at how groups of employees in the organization are being compensated.
• The new Payroll Code field allows HR to track employees in Employee Manager, and be ready for the future ability to transfer this data to the payroll system through HROffice Payroll Connect.
• Updated EEO-1 job and ethnic origin categories support new 2007 government reporting requirements so HR can be confident and prepared as the 2007 reporting deadline approaches.

EASIER UPGRADES AND FASTER REPORTING PERFORMANCE:

HROffice 7.5 eliminates the export/update/import process during upgrades. No longer will the process create a new, renamed, HROffice database in SQL Server with each version upgrade. Beginning with 7.5, HROffice will simply upgrade the database in place. Benefits include:

• Feature enhancements can be delivered in more frequent maintenance upgrades rather than major version releases.
• Upgrading the database in place drastically reduces upgrade processing time and is more reliable. Internal tests indicated upgrade processing time improvements of 25% and greater.
• No need for the IT department to update external applications or custom SQL programming that references the HROffice database name.

Report generation performance has been radically improved in HROffice 7.5, with a particularly dramatic impact on larger HROffice databases. As a result, all HROffice users can expect to experience significant decreases in report processing time, accelerating the output capability for both standard and custom reports.