We're pleased to announce the 2.74 release of Access People for Hospitality, focusing on a new configurable notification feature and a series of targeted bug fixes across payslips, holiday pay, mobile leave booking, rota management, and email notifications.

The notification setup screen now supports a two-part trigger: an offset from a milestone date such as a birthday or service anniversary and a separate advance warning period. This makes it possible to configure notifications such as alert me 3 months before an employee's 18th birthday for the first time.

Previously, the notification screen only supported a single instruction — a number of days, weeks, months, or years before or after a date field. This made it impossible to configure a notification that required counting forward from a date for example, 18 years from date of birth and then issuing an advance warning for example, 3 months before that point.

A second field is now available on the notification setup screen, allowing the following types of notification to be configured correctly for the first time:

To access this area, follow the steps below:

The [Person.Firstname] replacement field in the Payslips Notification email template was not being substituted with the employee's first name. Employees were receiving the notification with a blank space where their name should have appeared.

The field substitution has been corrected. Payslip notification emails now include the employee's first name as expected.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

Where a payroll administrator had added an Employers Contributions section to the payslip configuration, the section was rendering outside the bounds of the payslip table in the PDF printable version. The heading was partially obscured by the table above it and the content appeared in the lower right corner of the page rather than in the correct position within the payslip layout.

The PDF payslip template has been corrected. The Employers Contributions heading and its rows now render within the payslip table in the correct position.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

When processing a termination for an employee with a mid-week leaving date, the Get Balance calculation was under-reporting the accrued holiday balance. The system was reading from weekly leave accrual rows, which only exist for completed weeks, meaning any days accrued in the current part-week up to the leaving date were not included. The result was a final holiday pay figure that was too low, regardless of when the calculation was run.

The calculation has been updated. For leavers, if the leave accrual rows do not cover the termination date, the balance is now pro-rated to the exact leaving date. The final holiday pay figure is now consistent however many times it is recalculated and no longer depends on the overnight accrual job having run.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

When a rota day had been marked as complete at sub-section level, any clock-out recorded by an employee after that point was silently discarded by the system. The clock-in was visible on the daily view but no matching clock-out appeared, even though the clocking device had recorded the time correctly and transmitted it without error. The employee's hours and pay were not affected, as the shift time was already recorded, but the daily view showed an incomplete record.

The check that determines whether a clocking can be accepted has been aligned with the check that marks a day as complete. A clocking that cannot be saved will now be reported as a failure rather than silently discarded, making these cases visible so they can be investigated and retried if needed.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

When attempting to change or add a shift code on a rota for an employee who had existing clock data, the system returned a 'Shift Conflict Detected' error and prevented the change from being saved. This occurred because removing the existing shift time while a clock record still referenced it caused a database constraint violation.

The reference on the clock record is now cleared before the shift time is removed, allowing the change to be saved without conflict. Clock records themselves are never deleted, and employees' actual recorded hours are not affected by the shift code change.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

When the Holiday Entitlement: Round Up setting was enabled, the system rounded an employee's available balance up to the nearest whole day (for example, 2.66 days shown as 3 days) in the People UI. However, when the employee attempted to book those 3 days via the mobile app, the request was rejected with a message stating their entitlement had been exceeded.

The entitlement check used during mobile leave booking was reading from an unrounded internal value rather than the rounded figure displayed to the employee. This has been corrected. When the Round Up setting is on, the entitlement check now uses the same rounded value the employee sees, and bookings up to that figure are accepted.

To access this area, follow the steps below:

Automated email notifications for the following milestones were not being sent:

The root cause was a configuration limitation: these notifications were set to trigger a number of months before the employee's date of birth or continuous service date directly, rather than before the age or service milestone. Because no employee has a date of birth in the future, the daily search found no matching records and sent nothing.

This release adds the two-part offset field described in the What's New section above, which makes it possible to correctly configure these notifications. Existing notification records will need to be updated in Setup > Content > Emails to use the new offset configuration.

You can view the release notes in a couple of ways: