Q4 2024 / Q1 2025 release recap
Updated
by
Leigh Hutchens
Quinyx web app
As we wrap up the latest quarter, we're excited to share the key updates and improvements that have been released across the Quinyx platform. This recap highlights the most impactful new features, performance improvements, and usability enhancements aimed at helping you manage your workforce more efficiently and effectively. Each feature is designed to make your day-to-day tasks simpler, from streamlining scheduling processes to providing new insights into workforce productivity.
Q4 2024 / Q1 2025 new functionality and imrprovements
Version 0198
Sorting schedule and base schedule on employee seniority
In some of our target markets, notably as per various trade union agreements in the USA, schedulers are to consider the seniority of their employees when making scheduling decisions. As a first step in providing schedulers with these insights, we’re enabling the sorting of employees in the schedule and base schedule view based on employee seniority.
The sorting in question requires configuration in Account settings > Additional fields, as described in the Version 0195 release notes.
Example:
- Set up an additional field to capture the date employee seniority, and select Use for sorting in Schedule/Base schedule.
- Input your employees' additional field value manually in the People tab or using the UpdateEmployees SOAP API.
- In Schedule or Base schedule, select the Employee sorting radio button corresponding to the additional field you configured for this purpose.
- If your employee’s seniority date is as follows:
- Tina Turner: 2024-02-01
- Lynnsay Anastasia: 2024-03-01
- Helen Wake: 2024-04-01
- Hannah Montana: 2024-04-01
- Gregory Payne: 2024-05-01
- Francis Eccle: 2024-06-01
- Eros Ramazotti: 2024-07-01
- District Mgr: 2024-08-01
- Anna Stevenson: 2024-09-01
- Angela Cooke: 2024-10-01
Then, the employee sorting will be displayed as in the image below.
The sorting is ascendant, and employees with identical seniority dates are sorted alphanumerically by first name. Hannah Montana and Helen Wake are examples of the latter.
Additional details regarding employee sorting using Additional fields
The sorting logic below applies for each respective field type available in Additional fields:
- Date: Employees with the most seniority are displayed on top; in case of identical values, employees are sorted by first name.
- Text: Alphanumerically; in case of identical values, employees are sorted by first name.
- Checkbox: Employees with the value “True” display on top, followed by employees with the value “False”; in case of identical values, said employees are sorted by first name. This option currently some inconsistencies, which are being addressed.
- Menu: Alphanumerically; in case of identical values, employees are sorted by first name.
New parameter to exclude overtime shifts from bank holiday eligibility calculations
In response to customer needs, we’ve introduced an enhancement that allows users to exclude overtime shifts from the calculation of worked hours used in bank holiday eligibility rules.
What does this mean?
This version introduces a new backend parameter that can be triggered to ignore shifts marked as “overtime” when calculating total worked hours for bank holiday eligibility & compensation (BH E&C).
To exclude a shift from the BH E&C calculation, follow these steps:
- Open Shift types and click to edit the shift.
- Go to Advanced Settings.
- Select the Overtime Shift checkbox.
When checked, these shifts will not count toward the worked hours in BH E&C calculations.
For example, if an employee has worked 40 days over the past 8 weeks but has one “Overtime shift” only 39 days will be considered in the calculation.
Quick(er) bulk editing of the Schedule view release #2
With this release, we’re continuing with additions to our new bulk actions functionality, which was explained in Version 0197 release notes.
In addition to the possibility of filtering out the shifts you want to edit, now you can multi-select a few of them that are the best to be edited together.
Using our existing “hand-picking” functionality, you can now select more than one shift.
The number of selected shifts will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.
Next to the number of selected shifts, you’ll see two options:
- Edit selected shifts
- Clicking this button displays a bulk edit panel containing the same options described in the previous release.
- Delete selected shifts
- Clicking on this button, you will be asked to confirm the deletion of selected shifts.
Version 0199
Clock-in restrictions for QClock
In this release, we're introducing the possibility to configure clock-in restrictions for QClock (read more about QClock here).
Organizations struggle with unexpected employee time. Employees may consistently clock-in 10 minutes early for a shift (because of a bus route, for example), and this excess time adds up to millions of dollars in large organizations. With this feature, employees can be blocked from clocking in by admin-designated time increments that can only be overridden by a manager.
Configure clock-in restrictions
To configure clock-in restrictions for your organization, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Account settings and click on Restrict clock-in under the QClock menu.
- Click on the add rule button in the top right corner.
- Give the rule a name.
- Define the number of minutes before or after shift start an employee is allowed to clock-in (anything outside of that will be restricted).
- Select one or multiple agreement templates that should use this rule.
- Click Save.
If you later wish to update or delete an existing rule, you just navigate to the same page and open the rule to update it, or use the trash can icon to delete it.
Clock-in when a restriction rule is configured
When a restriction rule is configured, employees will see a warning message if they try to clock-in outside of the allowed clock-in rule. The clock-in button will be disabled and the employee will not be able to proceed with the clock-in.
Manager override
Any manager within the organization can choose to override the clock-in restriction and allow the employee to clock-in even when they are outside of the configured clock-in restriction rule. To do that, the manager has to enter their badge number. The clock-in button will then be enabled, and if the badge number belongs to a manager the employee can proceed with the early clock-in.
Quick(er) bulk editing of the schedule view release #3
In this release, we're enhancing the bulk actions functionality by introducing a new option in the Schedule view.
You can now add multiple unassigned shifts in a single action. Similar to the Base schedule view, can specify the number of unassigned shifts you'd like to add directly within the existing Add Shift panel.
Click the Save button, and the specified number of unassigned shifts, such as five shifts of the same type, will be created in the Schedule view.
This update streamlines the process, reducing the time and number of clicks required to add shifts.
Warnings panel: Better visibility into shifts with warnings
With this UI improvement to the Warnings Panel, you can now easily see the number of shifts that have warnings versus those that don’t. This enhancement gives you greater clarity on the impact of actions such as creating, editing, copying, and moving across multiple shifts simultaneously.
Additionally, the same information will be available for the Base Schedule rollout, allowing you to track how many shifts have been successfully rolled out versus those that have warnings.
Updated warning message for late schedule changes
As of this release, warning messages for late schedule changes will now include an additional reminder for managers. This will encourage managers to use the Offer Shift functionality, allowing them to get an employee's approval before assigning a shift that falls outside the defined schedule in the employee’s agreement.
Old message: Late schedule change.
New message: Late schedule change, we suggest that you offer these changes to the employees to get their approval.
Version 0200
Reminders 2.1 - Consecutive absence reminders
In Version 0197, we released our first absence-based reminder recurring absence of non-consecutive days where you could configure reminders to notify affected users when an individual has been absent regularly within a certain time window.
And now, with this release, we are adding more control here with consecutive absence reminders, which allows you to track when users have been absent for extended periods within a certain time period to help you action different types of absences in the best way possible.
License overview
With this release, we’re adding a simple license overview to the Account Settings where account owners can view the license information for their organization, enabling users to optimize their setup better.
Remaining audit logs origin for Shift requests
With this release, we're adding origin information for remaining shift requests inside our Audit logs.
Shift requests in question are: Shift swaps, Shift unassignment requests, and Shift assignments on away unit that already exist as separate “Item types” inside Audit logs framework.
Origin provides additional insight into where the action reviewed took place. As highlighted in the image below, the origin information is located in smaller text below the main value in the Action made by column of the view.
The table below contains an exhaustive list of the various origin values you may encounter as you browse your log search results and the cases in which the values will display. The logic in the origin naming aims to support you in resolving disputes or issues concerning workforce planning and attendance and is as follows:
- In most cases, it reflects the Quinyx “platform” where the action got triggered, such as the Manager portal, Mobile, Webpunch, or Integration.
- However, suppose the action has been triggered by a specific feature that has cascading effects on other parts of Quinyx, such as deleting or reassigning the shift; this will display as the origin instead.
Action | Origin | Item | Cases |
Creation | Via Mobile | Shift swap Shift unassignment request | When an employee creates a request in Mobile. |
Creation | Via Staff portal | Shift unassignment request | When an employee creates a request in the Staff portal. |
Creation | Via Manager portal | Shift assignment on away unit | When manager creates a request scheduling the employee on away unit. |
Deletion | Via Mobile | Shift swap Shift unassignment request | When an employee deletes a request in Mobile. |
Deletion | Via Staff portal | Shift unassignment request | When an employee deletes a request in the Staff portal. |
Deletion | Due to shift deletion | Shift swap Shift unassignment request Shift assignment on away unit | When the requests are deleted because the shift itself has been deleted. |
Deletion | Due to ended employment | Shift swap Shift unassignment request Shift assignment on away unit | When the requests are deleted because the employee’s employment has ended. |
Deletion | Due to employee deletion | Shift swap Shift unassignment request Shift assignment on away unit | When the requests are deleted because the employee itself has been deleted. |
Approve | Via Manager portal | Shift swap Shift unassignment request Shift assignment on away unit | When the manager approves the request in the Manager portal using the Notifications panel section. |
Approve | Via Mobile | Shift swap | When the employee approves shift swap in Mobile. |
Deny | Via Manager portal | Shift swap Shift unassignment request Shift assignment on away unit | When the manager denies the request in the Manager portal using the Notifications panel section. |
Deny | Via Mobile | Shift swap | When the employee denies shift swap in Mobile. |
Deny | Due to shift reassign | Shift swap | When the shift swap is denied because a shift is reassigned to an employee who was in the list of employees but didn't apply for that shift. |
Auto Schedule and Auto Assign warnings
In this release, we have introduced Auto Schedule and Auto Assign warnings. The aim of this functionality is to provide AI users with more insights into scenarios where the algorithm runs have been successfully completed but might, for some reason, not have optimally created or assigned shifts to certain employees due to one or multiple reasons.
How do I know whether there are relevant warnings in my latest algorithm run?
If an algorithm run has finished but with some potentially relevant warnings, there will be a mention in the notification when the algorithm run has completed that there might be one or more warnings for one or more units.
To view the warning details, go to the algorithm run tables. You can find the warnings of specific algorithm runs by selecting the run in the run table and viewing the warnings in the run details side panel.
What type of warnings can I get notified about?
There are different types of warnings for Auto Schedule and for Auto Assign. Each warning also comes with a suggestion of what you can do to resolve the warning.
You can get the following type of warnings for Auto Schedule:
- No active agreements: This warning is shown whenever you don’t have any active agreements for your employees. In this case, the algorithm run will be complete without creating any shifts.
- Supply/demand gap: This warning is shown whenever the number of hours required is higher than the number of hours available for one or multiple shift types. This means that you might need to schedule 400 hours within a specific week, but you only have 300 hours available employee hours.
- Missing requirements: This warning is shown whenever some of the shift types have no required headcount and shifts and, therefore, can't be created.
- Faulty shift type configuration: This warning is shown whenever there are shift type templates with conflicting shift rules. Currently, these rules are configured outside of Quinyx, so you should, therefore reach out to Quinyx if you get this warning on your algorithm run.
- Faulty break configuration: This warning is shown whenever there are break rules with conflicting rules. Currently, these rules are configured outside of Quinyx, and you should, therefore reach out to Quinyx if you get this warning on your algorithm run.
The following type of warnings you can get for Auto Assign:
- No employees are eligible: This warning is shown whenever you don’t have any employees qualified or available to work specific shifts. To resolve this warning, you should review employees' availabilities and available hours or skills.
- No shifts eligible: This warning is shown whenever you have certain employees who are not eligible to work any of the shifts available to be assigned. This could be due to the qualifications of the employee or their availabilities not matching the available shifts.
- No shifts to be assigned: This warning is shown whenever there are no shifts to be assigned within the period you have selected to run the algorithm for.
- Shifts fixed for non-eligible employees: This warning is shown whenever employees who were previously assigned shifts within the schedule period that the algorithm is run for are non-eligible.
- Misalignment between agreement and scheduling period: This warning is shown whenever some employees don’t have an active agreement for part of the days within the scheduling period.
Advanced Analytics - Forecast data dashboards
With this release, we’re introducing advanced insights around Forecast Data usage within Quinyx, expanding the scope of analysis from unit-level insights to district and global analysis via two new dashboards in Advanced Analytics.
- Upcoming Forecast Demand: Provides a forward-looking view of projected demand over the next defined period based on historical sales data. The dashboard visualizes total forecasted items with potential variances and highlights outliers, enabling quick action for more precise demand planning.
- Historical Forecast Accuracy: Offers insights into forecasting accuracy by comparing past forecasts with actual demand and identifying significant discrepancies and trends. This dashboard helps improve forecast precision over time, making demand planning more reliable and actionable.
These dashboards will empower you to make informed decisions based on comprehensive forecast data over different groups and extended periods rather than focusing on only individual units. In doing so, we’re enabling new actionable insights to allow users to identify underperforming units, spot peaks in demand, and analyze trends over time to supercharge your forecasting.
Version 0201
Advanced reminder history
With this release we’re introducing an Advanced Reminder History, which lets you get a better overview of your reminder activity. By navigating to Account settings > Advanced settings > Reminders > Reminder history, you can see a detailed history of all reminders triggered within your organization, to whom, and when.
Here, you can filter by date, reminder type, groups, or individuals to verify that reminders are being triggered as expected. This also allows you to proactively follow up, ensuring the right people are notified based on the correct criteria and at the appropriate time.
Quick(er) bulk editing of the Schedule view release #4
With this release, we're enhancing our bulk actions functionality by introducing two new options in the Schedule view.
- With the first improvement, you can now add multiple assigned shifts in a single action.
Selecting multiple employees within the existing "Add Shift" panel will determine the number of assigned shifts that will be added after clicking Save.
When creating shifts this way, the agreement value will be defaulted to “Selected automatically”. This means that each individual shift, assigned to a selected employee, will be assigned the agreement that belongs to that specific employee following the regular agreement assignment logic. The value “Selected automatically” presented while creating the shifts will not be editable, but you can always edit the assigned agreement in the shift after it's created.
Similar to agreements, if cost centers are connected to individual employees, due to inheritance logic, we will follow that inheritance logic and the field will default to “Selected automatically”. In this case, the manager can always remove the automatically added cost center or select one manually that will apply to all created shifts.
- With the second improvement, you will be able to use a new option to update time, breaks, and tasks inside our existing Bulk edit panel.
A new option in the time drop-down is called “Adjust time by earlier/later” and will allow you to extend or shorten all selected shifts by a specified number of hours and/or minutes.
When this option is selected, you will be presented with new fields to change the shift's start and/or end time and to decide if you want it to start/end earlier or later by the selected amount of hours/minutes.
If this option is selected inside the time drop-down, to follow a similar logic, you can adjust breaks and tasks in a similar manner using new options called “Adjust to the new start time” or “Adjust to the new end time”. This option will adjust the time of the breaks and tasks for the same amount as selected in the time dropdown.
Example: If you have selected “End - Later - 1 hour” inside the time dropdown, this will extend the end time of selected shifts for 1 hour. Selecting “Adjust to new end time” inside breaks and tasks, will result in moving breaks and tasks by 1 hour later as well.
Scheduling accuracy KPIs
In this release, we have introduced the second, of many to follow, scheduling KPI: Scheduling Accuracy KPIs.
What is the purpose of scheduling KPIs?
Scheduling KPIs are the first step to an improved schedule. Scheduling KPIs aim to help store managers verify the quality of their schedules during the schedule creation phase and look back at an already worked schedule with the help of several metrics. These KPIs are single metrics that are easily accessible and configurable on an organizational level so that you can ensure that your store managers look at the right metrics when creating their schedules.
The second scheduling KPI that is possible to configure is related to Scheduling Accuracy.
What are Scheduling accuracy KPIs?
Scheduling accuracy is an important KPI for local managers to be able to verify while creating a schedule whether they have scheduled the right team members at the right place at the right time. Scheduling accuracy is important for the local manager and also for the whole organization to ensure that you are not overscheduling during moments where there is less demand or underscheduling during peak moments. Overscheduling and underscheduling can have a negative impact on your scheduling costs, your employees' well-being and productivity, and customer experience (which in turn can result in lost revenue).
Scheduling accuracy is calculated based on your forecasted headcount need compared to your existing schedule, and it lets you know whether there are adjustments you need to make to your schedule to ensure that you are more prepared for the future.
In this release, we have released three scheduling accuracy KPIs:
- Underscheduled hours: The number of hours you are underscheduled within the scheduling period selected
- Overscheduled hours: The number of hours you are overscheduled within the scheduling period selected
- Hit percentage: The percentage of total hours within the scheduling period selected where you are scheduling exactly according to demand.
How can you configure Scheduling accuracy KPIs?
Scheduling Accuracy KPIs can be configured in Optimization Settings > Scheduling KPIs. Scheduling Accuracy KPIs don’t require any additional configuration. You only need to select which Scheduling Accuracy KPIs you want to consider. You can choose one or multiple of the Scheduling Accuracy KPIs available.
Select Create and then Scheduling Accuracy.
You can then select one of the three available scheduling accuracy KPIs and customize the name displayed on the scheduling page if you'd like a different label. Additionally, a short description of each KPI is provided for your reference.
Hit Save whenever you’re ready. If you also want to add another scheduling accuracy KPI, you just have to go through the same process again.
If the KPI has been selected to be shown on the Schedule page, you will now, when selecting the target icon in the schedule view, see the newly added KPI together with all other scheduling accuracy KPIs or productivity KPIs you have added.
Calculation details
Independently of what data granularity you have on your underlying forecast data, which impacts your optimal headcount data, we calculate all Scheduling Accuracy KPIs based on hourly data. For example, if you have optimal headcount data on a 15 minute level we will use the hourly average before calculating the Scheduling Accuracy KPIs.
Over scheduled hours are calculated by comparing the hourly averaged total optimal headcount to the hourly averaged total scheduled headcount and summing the total headcount hours where scheduled headcount is above the optimal headcount hours. E.g. If the optimal headcount is 2 and the scheduled headcount is 4 for two hours in a row then you have 4h of over scheduled hours
Under scheduled hours are calculated by comparing the hourly averaged total optimal headcount to the hourly averaged total scheduled headcount and summing the total headcount hours where scheduled headcount is below the optimal headcount hours. E.g. If the optimal headcount is 5 and the scheduled headcount is 2 for two hours in a row then you have 6h of over scheduled hours
Hit percentage is calculated by taking the total number of hourly buckets where the scheduled headcount is exactly equal to the optimal headcount and comparing that to the total hours of the day. E.g. if you schedule exactly according to demand 2 hours out of the 8 hours, then the hit percentage is 2/8 = 0,25 = 25%.
Additional information
- You can add multiple scheduling accuracy KPIs.
- The scheduling accuracy KPIs are calculated based on the timeframe you’re looking at in the schedule view. If you’re looking at a single day, the KPI is calculated only for that day, while the weekly view would show the KPI based on data from that whole week.
- Different to how productivity KPI is calculated, scheduling accuracy KPI is NOT impacted by filters in the schedule view.
- The scheduling accuracy KPIs are recalculated quickly after the changes are made (you don’t have to click somewhere to manually recalculate them).
Version 0202
Offer shifts to multiple employees
We’re excited to introduce a new enhancement to our Shift offer functionality. With this update, managers can now offer a single shift to multiple employees at once. This streamlines the filling open shifts and reduces the time it takes to find a suitable employee.
How It Works:
- When creating a shift offer, managers can select multiple employees in the "Employee" field.
- Once the shift offer is saved, all selected employees will be notified via Qmail and the mobile app.
- The first employee to accept the offer will be assigned the shift, while all other employees will be notified that the offer is no longer available.
This improvement makes shift management more efficient and helps you quickly fill vacancies while keeping employees informed.
Manager comments on shift swap requests
Based on valuable feedback from our users, we're excited to introduce a new feature that allows managers to add comments when handling shift swap requests.
What’s New: Managers can now leave a comment in the Notifications panel of the Manager portal before approving or denying a shift swap. This feature enhances transparency by providing employees with clear explanations for manager decisions, particularly when a swap is denied.
- The comment will be visible to employees in the Qmail they receive.
- Managers can also view these comments in the Shift swap audit logs for future reference.
Looking Ahead: In upcoming releases, we’ll expand this functionality to include Shift booking and Shift unassignment requests.
Thank you for your continued feedback in helping us improve the product!
PDF Export for Advanced Analytics
With this release, we've re-enabled support to export your Advanced Analytics dashboards as PDFs so that you can easily share and distribute your insights as you see fit. PDFs can be generated in different sizes and printable formats (as well as, alternatively, exported as a CSV).
Permission for users to approve their own absences
With this release we’ve adding a new permission, to allow you to configure whether users should be able to approve their own absences.
Under Agreement Templates > Absence Types you select whether users on that agreement template should be able to approve which, if any, of the absence types available to them.
Who can actually approve their own absences?
Employees with the employee role only have access to the Staff Portal, which is limited to submitting absence applications. They do not have access to the Manager Portal, where absences can be reviewed and approved. As a result, employees cannot approve any absences, including their own.
On the other hand, only users with the manager role and the necessary Absence Write permissions have the ability to approve absences. Even in the case of managers, the new "approve own absence" configuration only applies after all existing validations have been performed. This ensures that no employee or manager can bypass established permissions
That is - the new "user can approve own absence" configuration does not override any existing validations. It is an additional layer of validation. Before the system considers whether a manager or employee can approve their own absence, all existing validations are applied first to ensure the user has the role-based and other necessary permissions to approve absences in general.
Only after all other validations pass does the system check if the absence belongs to the user and if they have permission to approve their own absence. By default, the configuration is enabled for all absence types to maintain the current behavior and avoid breaking existing setups. This should require an explicit decision from the customer to disable it for each absence type.
Metric display mode default leveraging agreement information
Many of you have requested a piece of functionality that’s already supported in Quinyx, namely that of making the name of the agreements in use more easily accessible when working on or monitoring your employee’s schedule. This information is already available on hover when the “By agreement” option of the Display options > Metric display mode is selected. Thanks to your feedback, it has come to our attention that many of you are unaware of this feature but find it very valuable once you’re made aware of it. For that reason, as of this release, we’re changing the Metric display mode default from Totals to By agreement for all manager portal users as an exceptional, one-off measure. This applies to both for Schedule and Base schedule. Note that each user can change it back as per their personal preferences.
Date picker updates
We’re continuously replacing the date pickers in Quinyx. This is beneficial to our system’s technical health, and the difference is barely noticeable to the human eye. As of this release, we’ve replaced the date picker in Account settings > Shift types > Update shifts as well as in Group settings > Shift types > Update shifts.
Version 0203
Edit date on multiple shifts in the Schedule view
This new addition to our Quicker bulk actions in the Schedule view now allows you to quickly edit the date for multiple shifts at once. Selecting multiple shifts, now you can update their dates simultaneously and confirm the changes in a single action. This will improve scheduling efficiency and reduce time spent on the planning process.
Manager comments on Shift booking requests
Similar to the previous release, we are now introducing a new feature that allows managers to add comments when handling Shift booking requests.
What’s New: Managers can now leave a comment in the Notifications panel of the Manager portal before approving or denying a Shift booking request. This feature enhances transparency by providing employees with clear explanations for manager decisions, particularly when a Shift booking is denied.
- The comment will be visible to employees in the Qmail they receive.
- Managers can also view these comments in the Shift booking audit logs for future reference.
Looking Ahead: In upcoming releases, we’ll expand this functionality to include Shift unassignment requests as well.
