Dynamics 365 Human Resources release notes

On the 27th of January 2020, Microsoft announced the range of new features coming to Dynamics 365 Human Resources on the 1st April 2020. This forms part of Microsoft’s wave 1 2020 updates.  Microsoft has announced a wide range of new feature updates in this wave for Dynamics 365 Human Resources. This forms part of Microsoft’s 6 monthly updates on Dynamics applications and their commitment to continual enhancements across their full range of Dynamics 365 products.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources release notes

Formerly Dynamics 365 Talent , and available from 3 February 2020, Dynamics 365 Human Resources contains capabilities for human resources professionals, employees, and managers in leave and absence and benefits management programmes. The new capabilities will be released between February and September 2020, and include:

  • Create leave rules to meet company and regulatory policies – Providing more flexibility in the policies related to leave plans allows HR to configure leave and absence to meet their specific regional and company requirements. Along with these policies, providing additional ways on how employees accrue time off, such as full-time equivalent (FTE), provides HR more control when providing time-off benefits to employees.
  • Enhanced benefit plan configuration – Companies are offering broader and richer sets of benefits to attract and retain their employees. Enhanced benefit plan configuration provides organisations with the ability to manage their plans with a wider range of setup options to offer flexibility while supporting complex scenarios.
  • Enhanced worker benefit inquiry – The enhanced worker benefit inquiry form provides a summarised view of all of the benefits-related information for a worker, such as a single view of all the plans an employee is eligible for, view of the coverage options that the employee is qualified for, view of employee’s life event history and any future dated life events.
  • Flex credit programmes – Companies might want to showcase the cost of benefits to employees as well as give the employees control over the way they spend their benefit pounds. With advanced benefits, you can establish flex credit programmes to support these scenarios – Establishment of flex credit programme, made up of individual plans and proration rule definition to support retirement and other life events.
  • Leave calendar views – Enable employees and managers to plan time off more efficiently by providing a leave calendar for viewing who is and isn’t at work.
  • Online benefit enrolment – Benefit selections are an important part of an employee’s overall rewards package. Online benefits enrolment provides employees with the opportunity to review their benefits prior to selection and guides them through the checkout process.
  • Qualified life event processing – Life events provide the opportunity for employees to update their benefits selections based on changes in their situation, such as the adoption of a child or marriage. Life event processing enables an organisation to track these changes and update the associated benefits.
  • Suspend leave for employees meeting specific criteria – Organisations have policies around when employees should and shouldn’t accrue leave. In some cases, this means an employee’s leave accrual is suspended for a while on a specific type of leave.
  • Allow employees to buy and sell leave – Provide employees with the ability to buy leave via payroll deduction or cash out (sell) leave to be included in their pay. This allows employees to have more control over how they want to use their leave benefits.
  • Enable an absence manager to manage leave – In some organisations, a people manager might not be managing the leave for their team. This process might be handled by an absence manager for team members across multiple departments and teams.
  • Manage employee sick leave – Provide organisations with the ability to manage employee sick leave in more detail to meet company and regulatory policies.
  • Access and maintain HR data in Common Data Service – Integrations, extensibility, and reporting all have dependencies on Common Data Service as the source for the data needed across solutions. Bringing additional data to Common Data Service will continue over the course of 2020 release wave 1 and 2020 release wave 2, to enable scenarios to extend and integrate with Human Resources.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources users also get access to the Power Platform, and this has received a wide range of updates which will benefit HR leaders.

Overall this is great news for Dynamics 365 Human Resources users and those organisations considering it as a future solution. As with all Dynamics 365 updates, this is a free update that will be automatically applied on the 1st April for all users.