Current state: Under review
Version release: Silicon 1.44
Planned release to test: 10/10/2025
Actual release to test: 10/10/2025
Planned release to production: 17/10/2025
Actual release to production: 17/10/2025
Overview
Really, this is just a summary of the small chores and bug fixes that came up through the week and needed resolving:
[CHORE] Removal of ZIP download for records
Sometimes you have to stop to sharpen the chainsaw – doing so means you can cut wood quicker, with less energy and time. It does seem to be a very human thing, however, when you see a lot of wood in front of you, to just think you can’t take time out to sharpen your saw, because the wood needs cutting. But you do, right? You sharpen the saw, and you get the wood cut quicker than if you just keep chopping. The same applies in business processes and systems improvement – it is okay to take time to sharpen your systems. In that vein, to encourage the efficiency of sites with more than 100 timesheets, the ability to generate a full packet of timesheets, leave and attachments into a single ZIP file has been removed. Sites with more than 100 timesheets should have EDRMS integration by default, which allows profiling automatically with all workflow and related metadata. All information can still be generated if needed on demand, record by record.
[BUG] Leave requests approved after submission required recalculation to make up missing hours
Argh, crivens as they say – this was a right bother. Turns out, if a manager approved leave requests after the timesheet had been submitted, the timesheet showed missing hours to the value of those leave requests unless you pressed the recalculate button, which solved the problem. But what is the point of having to solve a problem with a button when you can just stop the problem from happening in the first place? This fix does that.
[BUG] Higher duties were not assigning alternative pay rate
As they say when you do more work, “Show me the money”. The pay rate assigned for higher duties was not getting passed through some pay systems. It now is.
[BUG] Inactive plant could still be selected for use
This was a bit of a case of, “What part of the word inactive do you not understand?”
Some plant classes refused to accept the fact that their status was now inactive, and any plant made inactive and linked to that class was still available for staff to try to cost time to. Of course, no one would ever cost to plant they couldn’t actually use, but just in case we fixed the issue, and inactive means inactive.
[BUG] JPEG attachments cannot be viewed
We made some changes for security and excluded all JPEG files for users still on Aluminium. Naturally, the JPEG files got sad about this. We have sat down and worked it out, and have also apologised for creating some big feelings just because they are a particular file type. Now they can be viewed as intended – unless they are still a security risk, in which case we will have another conversation.
[BUG] Excess-time was just doing some weird things
So turns out that if you tried to switch your excess-time to your secondary rules and keep pressing the switch button, you could create two copies of the excess-time. Which may raise the question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it fall, does it still provide a great opportunity to enrich the overall biomass of the forest?” It also asks the question, “Why would we allow that?” Short answer: We would not. So we fixed this. Between us, we also fixed another issue with the approve excess-time button process being s…u…p…e…r s…l…o…w to process. Now it is not.
[BUG] Higher duties approval
This bug meant that if you hadn’t approved a duty request before the relevant timesheet was submitted, then that duty request could not be approved. Not cool. So now you can just as you should.
[CHORE] Comments recorded against a record of work now show against relevant excess-time records
Look, there are a bunch of places people can make comments. It’s pretty awesome, but having to enter a comment again just so you can get your excess-time approved – maybe not so cool. So now, as well as displaying against each record that triggered the excess-time, we concatenate into the excess-time block to meet the comment required requirements (wait – can you require a requirement? is this an actual thing? I would investigate but I kinda like it so I don’t want to find out I shouldn’t use it) that people might have to meet in order to submit their timesheet.
[CHORE] Fixed error message that was not an error
The message when applying for leave in a closed payrun period now says, “You cannot apply for leave in payrun periods that have already been closed.” Prior to this, it just gave an error, which was not that helpful at all.
[BUG] Errors on passing data to users of Authority payroll
Argh, can we just skip this one? No, for real. No..?
Okay, fair enough, because this was actually not cool. Look, we were playing with some error correcting tools to try to help troubleshoot errors with the Authority API service, so we could help users using those services. In doing so, we accidentally impacted the rules we had for two sites where values were changed on the integration to match system setup. Basically, we 100% stuffed this one up. We fixed it, but it still sucked, so we have put some processes in place to avoid this (this is also what everyone says when they don’t want to admit stuffing up – but we did, we do, and we have).
[BUG] Timesheet totals not adding up
This was a pretty specific one where some timesheet totals were not syncing with changes if users had multiple entitlements on different roles and public holidays on one. That is resolved, though.
[BUG] Excess-time
We had issues with the excess-time, where for some users, the first level was the only excess-time getting triggered. This means additional levels were not calculated, and no min or max values were set. This was fixed pretty quickly, as you would hope for.
