Product and Services Update – Q4 2016

It’s hard to believe that 2016 is winding down already. If you are busy with your year-end efforts but don’t want to miss any news, we made it easy to see all the highlights from PrismHR this quarter in the Product and Services Update for Q4 2016 .

This update covers the following:

Product and Infrastructure Updates
Compliance
Services and Support Resources
PrismHR LIVE
Sales and Marketing Resources
Partnerships
Releases and Roadmap

Product and Infrastructure Updates

Key releases and updates from this quarter are below. Be sure to check out the roadmap section below for details on what’s coming next.

PrismHR Payroll, Benefits and HR

This quarter there were two PrismHR Payroll, Benefits and HR releases. These releases include employee PTO submissions and a range of improvements.

PrismHR Time and Labor

PrismHR Time and Labor continues to pick up steam, and more than 20% of PrismHR and HRPyramid customers have already adopted it. You can simplify time tracking and increase efficiency for your team and your clients with integrated Time and Labor. Learn more about PrismHR Time and Labor:

• View the demo
• Watch the full the webinar
• Contact your account representative

Reporting

Based on your feedback, reporting improvements have been separated from the regular release cycle to be able to give you more reporting enhancements faster. This quarter there have been 3 reporting updates so far.

Benefits Enrollment

Initial customers are now live on the next generation of Benefits Enrollment, and the team has been making a number of updates including new web enrollment bulk update forms, new web enrollment date update forms, new substitution variables, as well as additional enhancements and fixes.

For more on PrismHR Benefits Enrollment, you can:

• View the demo
• Read the eBook
• Contact us to learn more

API

Two API updates were delivered this quarter:

• API 1.6 introduced new methods to register and authorize employees to allow single sign-on to HRPyramid Web Edition and PrismHR Employee Self Service (ESS).
• API 1.7 provided the ability to retrieve Client Coordinator data (update to ClientMaster Service) and resolved issues related to employee data updates. Additionally, single sign-on for customers using both PrismHR and HRPyramid in tandem were made available.

PrismHR Hiring

PrismHR Hiring continues to help you extend the value you provide to your clients and expand your services through integrated easy-to-use job posting and applicant tracking. PrismHR Hiring has recently added a number of new capabilities, including timezones for meeting requests, new workflow options, auto “thanks but no thanks” emails, easy feedback collection from managers, enhanced applicant search, new job boards, improved LinkedIn posting and job categories for your Careers pages.

To learn more about PrismHR Hiring:

• Visit the PrismHR Hiring page
• View a recording of the recent PrismHR Hiring Webinar
• Contact us to learn more

HRPyramid

HRPyramid 14.2: Two maintenance updates were delivered this quarter — Service Pack 9 and Service Pack 10. Additionally, a number of reporting improvements have been released for HR Pyramid.

OnHRP Benefits Enrollment and Onboarding

OnHRP 2.19/R39 delivered improvements to the NY wage form, document viewing, and overall stability.

Security update

HR service providers and major retailers are being targeted with attacks that intend to take over a user’s account and change employee ACH data to point to non-traceable cash cards. Once complete, a normal payroll run will fund these untraceable cards instead of the employee.

One of the best approaches is to restrict IP access for superusers. Instructions to do this are in the help and documentation section of the PrismHR product. Additionally, an update enabled this capability for HRPyramid.

Infrastructure

As noted in previous Product and Services Updates, we’ve been investing in people, processes and technology to help improve your overall PrismHR experience. Over the past few months, we’ve made a number of changes and improvements, including adding more infrastructure, increasing monitoring for application health and performance, fixing a number of performance related issues, ensuring software infrastructure takes advantage of the most current technology, and significantly improving printing.

Overall, this has resulted in a faster, more performant user experience for PrismHR customers and provided significant improvements to uptime. We are continuing to make additional investments in infrastructure, architecture and software to deliver the best possible software for HR service providers.

Compliance

Since the last update, significant focus and development efforts have been spent addressing four federal items: ACA, FLSA exemption, SBEA, and the new I-9.  A few state level and industry specific items have been addressed as well.

Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The IRS issued Notice 2016-70, extending the “good faith effort” exemption from last year, as well as the deadline to send 1095s to employees from January 31, 2017, until March 2, 2017.  This is welcome news that should put filers at ease, especially those dealing with complex or nuanced situations or partial year data from new clients who started after January 1, 2016.

The product team made consistent improvements to refine the “register build” process and logic. This is a cornerstone of PrismHR’s ACA support and, with proper configuration, produces highly accurate coding for client level reporting. You also now have the capacity to allow employees to elect to receive their 1095 via employee self service, which can significantly reduce costs associated with employee mailings.

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

Two FLSA federal exemption based reports were released this quarter. However, on November 22, 2016, a federal judge halted the Department of Labor’s forthcoming changes to the salary prong of the FLSA exemption test. Amidst this murky situation, we’ve halted our work on an FLSA based payroll warning. Once more clarity is provided around the future of the FLSA regulations, we may adjust the two reports as well as continue our work to streamline reporting for the FLSA exemption test.

Small Business Efficiency Act (SBEA)

We are working on initial SBEA baseline functionality, including some new fields to identify certified employers, clients in a certified relationship, as well as work sites which fail the 85% test. Additionally, when flagged as a certified employer, this functionality triggers tax base accrual on the client, as opposed to employer, level. Through the first quarter of 2017, additional SBEA functionality will be developed, including support for schedule R via Master Tax.

I-9

The Department of Homeland Security released a new, finalized version of the I-9 on November 16, 2016. We are working to update PrismHR Onboarding with the new I-9 and ensuring cross system compatibility prior to January 22, when the existing I-9 becomes obsolete. Please look out for future communication regarding the new I-9 as well as a release to support it in early 2017.

Forecast for 2017

Given the results of the recent federal election, compliance planning for 2017 remains fluid in regards to federal regulations.

Questions or suggestions?

Do you have a question or suggestions about compliance?  Please contact Christopher Babigian at cpbabigian@prismhr.com.

Services and Support Resources

Year-End Resources

If you missed it earlier in December, you can now access the latest resources to help with year-end, including estimating W-2 quantities, reviewing pay codes and deductions for proper W-2 Box and Code completion, getting benefits plans ready for W-2 reporting, creating and printing 1099 forms and more.

Training

Are you increasing your team’s productivity and improving overall knowledge on a daily basis? More than half of PrismHR Payroll, Benefits and HR customers are using PrismHR Training today.  This program ensures your team has the the fundamental knowledge they need today and ongoing resources to improve efficiency and increase profitability.

PrismHR Training was recently enhanced with:

• Eight new sessions on ad-hoc reporting
• Benefits Enrollment set up, administration and employee self service
• Reporting and usability improvements

Learn more about PrismHR Training.

PrismHR LIVE 2017

PrismHR LIVE 2017 is coming to Nashville from June 13 to 15. Registration is now open and users are $1495 each. Sign up to attend on our PrismHR LIVE website.

Making PrismHR LIVE 2017 Even Better

Based on your input, we are improving PrismHR LIVE 2017 in a number of ways. This includes:

1. Access to more learning opportunities and content.
2. Easier learning with an improved format.
3. Flexibility.
4. Help to grow your business.
5. More networking

To learn more about these improvements check out the recent blog post.

New Sales Tips and Best Practices Content

You recently told us that converting prospects to opportunities and closing opportunities are some of your biggest challenges in acquiring new customers. Did you know that PrismHR SEEDS provides best practices and tips to help you overcome those challenges and many others?

Be sure to visit the SEEDS portal and check out the SEEDS blog to see a number of articles on sales best practices. Login to the SEEDS portal today to see what’s new, and if you aren’t already a member, now’s the time to sign up for free access to SEEDS.

Partnerships

PrismHR Marketplace Partner JuvodHR recently added Wage Compensation Analysis capabilities to make it easier for your clients to better determine how much employees should be paid based on market conditions.

Learn more by watching this demo.

Or read this article to better understand how this can help you and your clients.

Releases and Roadmap*

Product Release Strategy for 2017

Based on your feedback, the PrismHR product release strategy has been updated for 2017. We are currently planning on fewer releases compared to 2016, and we’ll include more overall improvements and fixes in each major release. More specifically we plan to:

• Provide one major product update every 3 months for PrismHR Payroll, Benefits, HR, Benefits Enrollment and API.
• Release ongoing reporting improvements, approximately every 2 weeks.
• Publish key compliance updates and critical fixes as needed.
• Deliver scheduled maintenance to provide the best possible system performance and reliability once a month for your PrismHR and HRPyramid Cloud environment. A schedule for this maintenance for 2017 is now available in the Customer Resource Center.
• PrismHR Time and Labor, Hiring and OnHRP releases will generally be provided when updates are ready, and we will provide advance notification of any planned downtime.
• We will continue to strive to provide at least one week advance notification of any minor releases that require downtime and at least two weeks advance notification for major releases.

Roadmap

As we start 2017, the team is focused on improving your overall experience, bringing more HRPyramid and Apex features, including reports, to PrismHR Payroll, Benefits and HR. Ongoing security and performance improvements continue to be the priorities.

We are continuing to work on compliance issues such as FLSA, ACA, I-9 and W-4, and more specifically, early in 2017, we will be releasing the 2016 1094c and 1095c PDFs as well as 2016 “AIR” transmission file updates. Later in 2017, we currently intend to review state and local specific items, including but not limited to pay stubs, minimum wage, and garnishment changes.

Enhancements will occur for PrismHR Benefits Enrollment throughout the year, including adding support for HRPyramid. User experience is also a significant focus area, especially for PrismHR Employee Self Service. The team is working on gathering customer requirements and planning for the next generation of Onboarding, with engineering currently planned to to start the 2nd half of 2017.

Work to streamline the Time and Labor new client setup and overall user experience is underway, along with a range of other improvements. The Hiring team is currently working on SMS text messaging with applicants and free/busy calendar integration that will enable users to easily coordinate candidate interviews with their entire hiring team.

*These roadmap statements represent PrismHR’s current intentions. PrismHR development plans are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Any reliance on these statements is at the relying party’s sole risk and will not create any liability or obligation for PrismHR.

Thanks for reading the PrismHR Product and Services Update. Do you have something you’d like to see in future updates? Please let us know at more@prismhr.com, and stay tuned for next quarter’s update!

See other PrismHR Product and Services Updates:

• Q2 2017
• Q1 2017