Welcome to 2025! We’ve got a lot of exciting updates to share with you this year (with a sneak peek of a few of these, if you read all the way to the end!). But before we get into that, we wanted to reflect on some of our favourite releases from the last few months that you might have missed in the lead up to the holiday season. If you’d prefer a visual ‘just the best bits’ summary, then check out our roundup video with Coach Micaela.
The January release highlight: Pay Rate Builder
This is the update we know many businesses have been waiting for — with our new Pay Rate Builder, you have the flexibility to track and calculate additional pay conditions outside of the standard industry Award template.
Either starting from scratch or building from an existing Award as a starting point, you can now easily build out the specific entitlements, allowances, rules and rates that make sense for your business and employee agreements.
Click here to learn more and get started with Pay Rate Builder. Note that Pay Rate Builder will be available in all accounts by 28 February, 2025.
What else is new?
Team members can now claim and request open shifts when marked as unavailable
Life is unpredictable, and we know that sometimes team members may want to pick up shifts even when they are typically unavailable otherwise. Managers can now open up an extra pool of team members to fill shifts through enabling their team to pick up open shifts even when they are unavailable, via toggling on this new location setting.
A better way to print and export your schedules
We know there are lots of reasons businesses may need to review their schedule outside of Deputy, which is why we’ve now made it easier to view all the scheduled shift details you need when printing or exporting your schedule. If you’re printing more than one week of the schedule, we’ve made it clearer to read by separating them into weeks, rather than a continuous schedule.
Improved exporting to Xero with pre-export smart validation checks
If you use Xero accounting software, we’ve released a new ‘Timesheet Preflight’ that will run a series of smart validation checks before you export into Xero. These checks will help ensure that any team members that already exist in Xero won’t be duplicated, any missing earning rates are automatically corrected, and timesheets that are already approved in Xero can’t be re-exported. Plus, if there something doesn’t look right, you’ll receive a detailed error report with links for how to resolve each issue quickly.
Seamlessly share your job ads on Seek
Hiring new talent? We’ve got you covered. Deputy HR now integrates with SEEK, Australia’s leading job platform! This integration makes it easier than ever for you to post job openings directly to SEEK, helping you find top talent faster and streamline your recruitment process. With this new feature, you’ll be able to:
Post job openings directly from Deputy to SEEK with ease
Reach a massive pool of qualified candidates across Australia
Spend less time managing recruitment and more time focusing on your business
View shift times based on the employees time zone, or the workplace location time zone
If your team members don’t live in the same time zone that the business operates on, this is the update for you! Employees can now choose whether they view their shifts based on their device's time zone (where they are located) or the business location's time zone. This way, employees living in a different time zone to their business know exactly when they need to start work, without having to do complicated time zone math!
Complete bulk actions on the schedule, in a jiffy
Whether you want to start creating your schedule again from scratch and delete all shifts, mark all shifts as empty, mark all empty shifts as open, or remove all empty shifts, we’ve made some big changes behind the scenes to massively speed up this process. We’ve also added a progress bar, so you know exactly how long the action will take.
Coming soon…
We’re taking reporting to the next level
We’re giving Deputy Reporting a complete overhaul—and that’s just the beginning. Alongside these updates, we’re thrilled to introduce Analytics+, a powerful new tool that puts data analysis at your fingertips.
With Analytics+, you can build and customize reports to suit your needs, giving you endless ways to slice, dice, and explore your data like never before.
Stay tuned for more updates as we redefine what’s possible with reporting in Deputy!
Get more granular, with Microscheduling
Rotate team members across multiple areas and locations within a shift. Deputy’s MicroScheduling optimizes demand peaks and enhances shift flexibility. If you want to stay in the loop with Microscheduling updates, or get early access to test it out, let us know here.
Skip the back and forth, with Deputy Messaging
With Deputy Messaging, streamline real-time communication with group chats and direct messages, all inside Deputy. Interested in getting up and running with Deputy Messaging? Register for early access here.
Power user tip
Adding new employees, or update employee details in bulk
Have you ever found yourself needing to make an update across all of your employees, and thought, “there must be a faster way to do this” — you were right! From the Deputy People tab, you can either add multiple new employees, or make updates across multiple employees at the same time using our bulk import and update tool.
To get started, you’ll need to first navigate to the people tab and select the purple ‘Add People’ button in the top right hand corner.
Then, you’ll need to select ‘Bulk import and update’ at the bottom of the dropdown list.
From here, you can follow the prompts to either add more team members, or update the details of existing members using a formatted CSV file.
You can read a more detailed breakdown of how to use this feature here, but it’s a great one to have up your sleeve next time you need to make a lot of changes across your team member base.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end! If you want to stay up to date with everything new in Deputy before our next newsletter, you can always visit whatsnew.deputy.com where we share regular updates from our product.