As HR Partner has grown alongside our customers, some reports containing large volumes of historical data could occasionally take longer to generate.

To improve reliability and performance, reports are now processed in the background. This ensures that even large or complex reports complete successfully without timing out.

What’s improved?

• Large reports now generate more reliably

• Long-running reports no longer risk timing out

• Reports can run in the background while you continue working

• Recently generated reports can be accessed instantly without re-running them

Running reports

For most reports, you won’t notice any difference.

However, if a report takes longer to generate, HR Partner will let you know and allow you to return later to download it once it has completed.

This means you can start a report and continue working elsewhere in HR Partner without needing to wait for it to finish.

Accessing recent reports

A new Recent Generated Reports section has been added to the bottom of the Reports page.

This area stores recently generated reports so they can be accessed instantly without needing to run them again.

From this section you can:

• View recently generated reports

• Download report exports instantly

• Access JSON, CSV or ZIP downloads created by reports

• Reopen reports without waiting for them to generate again

Reports remain available in this section for 7 days before being automatically removed. You can also delete them manually at any time.8

Need help?

If you have any questions or would like any assistance, our support team is here to help.

Following this change, HR Partner has been updated to ensure continued compatibility with Xero’s new leave policy format.

We’re pleased to confirm that HR Partner now fully supports these updated policies.

What this means for you

If your organisation is using Xero’s updated leave policies:

• Leave policies tracked in Weeks now appear correctly in HR Partner
• Employee leave balances display accurately
• Leave requests can continue to be submitted and managed as normal
• Your HR Partner and Xero integration remains fully synchronised

These policies will be visible within employee leave balance screens and behave consistently alongside existing leave types.

Creating leave requests

While leave balances may now display in Weeks (as provided by Xero), leave requests in HR Partner continue to be entered in Days.

This is by design.

HR Partner processes leave requests in Days or Hours, and we automatically handle the conversion in the background before sending the data to Xero via their API. There is no additional action required from administrators.

To make this easier for employees, a calculator is available directly within the leave request screen, allowing users to convert Weeks into Days if needed.

This ensures:

• Leave balances align with Xero’s new policy format

• Leave requests remain simple and consistent within HR Partner

• All conversions are handled accurately and automatically

Our commitment to seamless integration

HR Partner is designed to work reliably alongside Xero, and we continue to actively maintain compatibility as Xero evolves its platform.

Our team has implemented enhancements to ensure customers using the new policy format experience a seamless transition, with no disruption to day-to-day leave management.

Need help?

If you have any questions or would like assistance, our support team is here to help.

You will have probably noticed now that almost all files have to be accessed via a secure authenticated URL that has a specific time limit on it, which prevents people from accessing files even if they later manage to find out the direct URL to your file on HR Partner.

However this can also work against you, especially if you have a file like a Company Handbook or Employee Guide within your Company Library in HR Partner that you wish to send to team member via email, or an intranet link, and you want them to be able to access that file at any time in the future without you having to issue them a new timed URL.

The good news is that we just introduced a way to make your Library files 'public' via a new menu option.

You can use this menu option to toggle the file between 'public' and 'private'.

Employee file attachments will always be marked 'private' and will never be allowed to be shared without the full time sensitive link. At this stage, there is no option, or plans to allow our customers to change this.

HR Partner was also briefly caught up in the outage — but we’re pleased to confirm that the impact was minimal.

While the outage was outside of our control, HR Partner remained online throughout, with only a few features — including the ability to send emails and reminder notifications — affected for a short period of time. 

All data stayed secure, and there was no disruption to access or core functionality.

Although HR Partner itself remained online, some of the partners we use to communicate with customers were also impacted by the AWS outage, which limited our ability to send customer updates during that time.

As AWS have now fixed the issue, everything is fully operational once again. It’s business as usual at HR Partner.

You can check the status of HR Partner at any time by visiting our Status Page.

As always, if you have any questions or need any support with HR Partner, please contact our Customer Success Team via the in-app chat or by emailing support@hrpartner.io.

We went back to the drawing board to build a better way to show your team hierarchy, including some new display (and export) options.

If you haven't seen it, head over to Employees > Org Chart on your left hand menu in the admin portal (or click the Org Chart menu on the left of the ESS portal).

We have improved the presentation of the chart, and let you pick exactly how much information is included by using the toolbar at the top right.

You can also make the chart less wide by consolidating all reports for a single manager in a list format, instead of spread out on another tree branch.

And you can also 'flip' the chart sideways to get a better view without scrolling left and right so much.

And if you find the 'card' format too much, you can also switch to the 'simplified' view showing just the avatars and position names, which takes up a lot less space.

Some other bonuses with the new charts are:

• You can now export the chart as a PNG file, or a SVG vector file (which is more scalable and editable without losing fine detail).
• You can now have more than one person at the very top of the chart structure, i.e. multiple CEOs at the top of the tree.

We look forward to your feedback and any suggestions for improvements that we can make to your team charts.

If you check your system log under Setup > Tools > System Log, and see a lot of warnings there about 'Xero Employee Absence - Push Stalled' with the reason 'Unable to find matching Leave Policy in both systems.', then this in an indication that you were affected by the bug.

Normally, when we sync with Xero, we read a list of all leave policies attached to your employees in Xero, and store that information in the employee record in HR Partner. This way, when we go to push a leave entry to Xero, we can quickly find the leave policy details so we know which policy in Xero to push to.

Unfortunately, the bug meant that the employee leave policies were not being brought across from Xero, hence when the system went to send a leave entry to Xero, it could not find a leave policy to match to, resulting in the error.

We have now fixed this bug as of Monday 8th September 2025. All our customers will have to ensure that their company has successfully synced with Xero since this date (Hint: You can check how long ago your last sync ran by looking at the Xero widget in the lower right corner of your admin dashboard).

Once your company has done a successful sync, then any leave requests that are approved or entered after that should be sent to Xero successfully.

Any leave requests that were entered from the start of September to the 8th will have to be manually entered in Xero - sorry about that. You can delete existing leave entries and re-enter them in HR Partner, but it is probably quicker to print a report of all leave entries for that date range in HR Partner and manually enter them in Xero.

Our apologies for the inconvenience and confusion caused by this bug. Please feel free to contact us at support@hrpartner.io if you wish to know any more information, or you want to discuss anything with us.

You will be able to (a) remove widgets that your employees don't need (b) add new widgets from our collection which will continue to grow over the coming months, and (c) rearrange existing widgets to move higher priority ones further up the screen.

What's Changed?

The first thing you might notice when we roll out the changes, is that your employee's dashboard has gone from a 3 column layout, to a 2 column layout.

This enabled us to make management easier, as well as make existing widgets wider so that we could include more information on them.

What's New?

We have added several new widgets, including some fun ones like a random motivational message of the day, and a widget for you to put a company mission statement or manifesto to keep your team aligned and focused.

We have also added widgets that consolidate a lot of the older widgets in one - for example, instead of having separate widgets for outstanding Timesheets, Custom Forms and eSignature documents to sign, we now have a 'My Tasks' widget which shows all of these in the one place, meaning you can remove the other widgets for a much neater dashboard.

And in the coming months, we will be adding several more widgets which you can pick and choose from to further make your dashboards much more useful to your employees.

How do I configure the layout?

If you have the requisite admin user permissions to make system changes, you will see a new option under Setup > Configure > Layouts where you can edit the ESS Portal Dashboard layout.

Our improved editor lets you drag and drop widgets from the 'Available' list, onto 4 separate dashboard areas, the page header, the left and right columns, and the page footer area. You can even move widgets between these areas in order to emphasise important ones at the top, and less critical ones further down the page.

So now you can place informative widgets such as the company calendar in the wider footer area, and place often used ones like the Timeclock entry widget to be more prominent in the top of the rightmost column.

Where can I get more information?

We are busy building out our knowledgebase with new articles detailing exactly how to tweak your admin dashboard.

As always, you are more than welcome to reach out to our support team if you need any assistance, or have any questions at all.

Can I change the layout of my Admin portal dashboard too?

Great question, and the good news is that this feature is coming in the next few months. We wanted to see how the new employee dashboards worked, and iron out any problems here first, and then take all that learning over to the Admin dashboard (and eventually other dashboards like the Recruitment and Project ones as well).

Watch this space, and subscribe to our Workplace Blog so that you will be the first to know when this happens.

You can read more about your Custom ESS Dashboard here: Custom Employee Self-Service Dashboard and Your Custom Dashboard: Examples Our Clients Love!

Indeed

Indeed will no longer be capturing or sending data related to disability or ethnicity as part of job applications sent to HR Partner as part of our Indeed Apply integration with them. This means that these fields will no longer appear in application data received via Indeed in HR Partner.

Monster.com

Monster has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Parts of the business have been acquired by BOLD, but this only includes Monster’s US job board operations. As a result, Monster has temporarily suspended its European websites, effective 30 July 2025.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation and will keep you updated with any further information from either job board as it becomes available.

Unfortunately, these changes accidentally broke our Performance Management reminder emails, and prevented any reminders from going out. The bug was so obscure that our normal server logs didn't pick it up until some of our customers notified us that they weren't receiving reminders for reviews that were due.

It took us a couple of days to trace the bug and fix it, which was pushed out early this morning (Asia/Pacific time).

Unfortunately, what happened was that the system noticed that performance review reminders for the past 2 or 3 weeks had not been sent out successfully, so it decided to send them ALL out. At once.

This resulted in your team's Inboxes being flooded with a series of emails that all looked the same. Managers/supervisors who oversee their employee reviews were probably hit the hardest, with multiple reminders that should have been spread our over a couple of weeks all being received at the same time.

We are really sorry about this, but it looks like our system has caught up with the tens of thousands of emails that should have gone out now, so you shouldn't receive any more bulk notifications.

We will try and be a bit more careful about managing bulk deliveries in the future, but at least we are relieved to learn that the missed emails didn't just go into a 'black hole' and that our system does its best to always send important notifications out - no matter how late.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you wish to discuss this in more detail, and once again, we apologies for any surprises or inconvenience caused.

Sorting Applications

Firstly, just letting everyone know that an often requested feature, applicant sorting, has just been released. You have always been able to re-sort job applicants on the Kanban view manually, and have the system retain that ordering, but now you can quickly re-sort applicants according to their name, their star rating, or their application date.

This can be done on a stage by stage basis. The sorting by star rating is going to be especially useful soon! See below for why this is so.

Coming Soon: AI assisted application evaluation

Some of our lucky customers have already been Beta testing ADA our AI powered Applicant Data Analyst which is a new feature we are excited to release in the coming weeks.

Ada will basically sit alongside your other selection panel members, and she can evaluate incoming job applications either individually on demand, or automatically as they come in from your own HR Partner job board or third party job boards like Indeed.

Ada will look at the applicant's resume, cover letter, and their answers to your job application form, and compare it to your job listing to evaluate suitability. She will fill in your Scorecard with comments and star ratings, and add a Comment to the job application with her thoughts, and she will even see if the resume or cover letter was auto-generated using AI and warn you if the probability is high. (And yes, we appreciate the irony and challenges of using AI to catch AI! 😉).

Like all the AI tools we are building into HR Partner, we like to see AI work alongside and help humans, rather than replace them, and Ada is just that - another selection panel member that adds her thoughts and ratings to a job application to enable quicker summarising by other human panel members.

Once Ada has evaluated your applications, you can then use the new Sorting feature mentioned above to re-order applicants in a certain stage according to the star ratings she gave!

Coming Soon: Custom ESS Dashboard

Also coming our very soon is a completely configurable ESS dashboard, letting you choose which widgets are shown to your employees, and letting you remove widgets they don't need to see, and reordering other widgets to make common ones easier to get to.

We have also added a bunch of new widgets that you can choose from, including a more streamlined 'things for me to do' widget that groups all tasks that your employees need to do in one place for easier reference.

We have also added fun new widgets like a 'motivational quote of the day' and company mission statements etc. so you can really personalise your ESS dashboard and make it more useful for your employees.

Keep an eye out on this Workplace Blog for more about these new features as we release them - make sure you subscribe to the blog so you don't miss out.

As always, we value your feedback, so please let us know what you think about these new features and enhancements by sending us an email at support@hrpartner.io

Previously, you could only have ONE location per public holiday entry, resulting in having to add multiple public holiday entries if there was the one holiday affecting your employees in multiple locations. This made the calendar look a bit messy with lots of tags for the same holiday on the same day.

Well, now when creating (or when importing) public holidays, you can either leave the Location field blank to have that holiday apply to every location, or you can select a group of locations to apply that holiday to.

This also results in a much cleaner calendar display now. Of course, you can still use the old method of having one location per public holiday, but this new change will make managing a team that is spread across multiple regions much easier.

Hope this change makes things easier for you to manage in HR Partner. As always, let us know if you notice any issues with this new change.