New employee time-tracking, smarter global hiring, and reduced termination risk: May 2023 product release notes

At Remote we’re building everything you need to hire, manage and pay your global team. 

We know this means Remote must easily connect into your existing tech stack. 

Done! 

Enter the new Remote and Zapier integration – you now have access to almost a literal gazillion more apps.

We know your company doesn’t just have the same generic requirements as any other business.

Boom! Solved! 

You can now create custom roles – they’re super powerful and can be precisely purpose-built for any specific task.

And we know that, even though you might not want to, you often have to track the time team members spend working.

Yeah, we’ve solved for that one too ;)

Our very first time-tracking feature is now live – and stay tuned for updates as we have many planned iterations to help you and your team track their time effectively.

And there’s one more super useful addition we’ve launched to help you to forecast exact employment costs around the world. We made a special view in our employee cost calculator to make it easy for you to compare total costs across multiple countries. Your Finance team will be thrilled with your pinpoint hiring budgeting.

Keep an eye out for the next edition of our product release notes as there’s plenty more to come in the next four weeks.

If you have any questions or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts with us on social media, with your Remote rep, or get in touch with the team.

What’s new at Remote?

Understand how your budget compares worldwide

Our employee cost calculator provides unique insight into the total cost of employment for a given salary in a certain country.

We’re excited to share a new update that allows you to easily gauge how your budget translates into gross salaries worldwide, and the cost of employment across countries. This gives you much more power to make strategic, cost-effective, and flexible hiring decisions – eliminating guesswork in the process.

Want to see how much your next hire will cost you?

Our free Employee Cost Calculator gives you a full breakdown of employment costs in every country.

Try it now

Zapier: Streamline your HR stack with 5000+ apps to automate workflows

Every HR team today relies on a multitude of apps and tools to manage recruitment, onboarding, time-off tracking, and more. Manually entering data in multiple tools and setting reminders for specific actions can be time-consuming and error-prone. 

The Remote and Zapier integration is an admin-banishing dream for People Teams everywhere. With one simple integration, you can sync data and automate actions across different apps across your tech stack. 

You can now seamlessly connect Remote with over 5000+ apps to create simple Zaps that automate your workflows. Users with any level of technical expertise can set these zaps up without any complex configuration.

Within a couple of clicks, our beta users have created timesaving automations like:

• Adding new hires to onboarding checklists in Asana

• Automatically updating employee information in their HRIS from Remote

• Sending notifications for upcoming performance reviews in Slack

• Syncing time-off data to teams’ calendars in Google Calendar 

Find out more about Zapier and Remote here - we can’t wait to see what new automation timesavers you can create for your team.

Beta: Time tracking for EOR and direct employees

No more spreadsheets or emails - now regular hours, breaks, and overtime can be tracked with ease. Employees can set this up in seconds, directly inside Remote.

Rolling out in June 2023, as part of our beta:

• Employees can provide their working hours in Remote

• If the timesheet includes only expected hours, the hours will be included in payroll for EOR employees as usual

• If the timesheet includes any overtime, employers will need to provide their approval inside Remote

Learn more about time tracking in this help center article. 

Upload documents to share with your team members

You can now securely store and share performance reviews, company policies, and any other documents with your employees in Remote. 

Head to an employee profile - whether contractor, direct employee, or an employee hired via our EOR services - and click ‘Add document’. Simple.

Protect access with customized roles and permissions

As you grow your team, you’ll need more precise controls to protect your team’s data. With our new customized roles and permissions feature, you have more flexibility to provide your team access to specific features within the platform.

You can create custom roles for your Finance team, recruiters, or people managers, and fine-tune permissions to ensure each role has the appropriate level of access to employee information, approvals, and more.

Find out more about creating a customized role for a company user.

Related: Allow people managers to approve contractor invoices

You can now create custom roles for people managers to approve invoices created by contractors who report to them.

More control over changes to EOR employee role information

Last month, we made it possible for employers to automatically amend employee’s salaries. This month, we’ve extended this feature to enable automate amendments for employee job titles and job descriptions. You can also backdate certain amendments. 

These changes are made without intervention from our in-house Lifecycle team, speeding up the process for you and your team members.

Changes can be requested from an employee’s profile or from the Requests tab, where you can also track the completion of existing requests for full transparency.

Get ahead of termination risks

As Remote is the legal employer for EOR employees, you must ensure compliance with local laws and regulations. Now, when you initiate termination of an EOR employee within Remote, you’ll be prompted to provide additional information to assess the potential risk of the termination.

This question asks customers to identify if the employee is:

1. on or has recently returned from sick leave;

2. on or has recently returned from maternity, paternity, or other family leave;

3. breastfeeding or pregnant;

4. requested medical or family leave;

5. disabled or has a health condition;

6. a member of a union or works council;

7. caring responsibilities;

8. reported any wrongdoing; raised any allegations of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, etc.; or asserted their employment rights or raised complaints about their working conditions;

In some countries, it’s extremely risky (or even illegal) to terminate an employee in certain circumstances. This information will help our offboarding specialists understand if there is a potentially high-risk termination case, and be able to provide the right support.

If you’re considering terminating an employee, make sure to let Remote know if any of these situations may apply.

You can search our Country Explorer for some specific country-level terminations details.

Improvements to contractor invoicing

We’re building the most effective contractor management platform, so you can focus on your business, not admin.

Our latest updates mean:

• Employers can now store hourly rates for your contractors in the Job title in their profile. This makes generating contractor invoices in bulk even faster - no more need to fill rate information manually.

• Contractors can now create automated invoices on a semi-monthly recurring basis

What’s coming next?

View and download contractor invoice summaries

Soon, you’ll be able to both view and download a CSV summary of your contractor invoices. You’ll be able to incorporate custom fields and download only the information you need, perfect for importing into spreadsheets or bookkeeping tools.

Track contractor hours in Remote

Within the coming months, your contractors will be able to log their hours worked directly in Remote. We’ll be extending this to eventually create even more efficiency around invoicing.

Improvements to Remote invoices

Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing two new updates to invoices generated by Remote.

• Service invoices will be generated, containing all one-time service costs like consulting, implementation fees, and other Remote-specific costs. These will no longer appear on your EOR invoices, improving your accounting process.

• Improved flexibility to offer partial credit notes for adjusting smaller corrections, as well as applying reconciliation credits to your next invoice where your pre-funding invoice estimated amount was higher than the actual costs incurred

Have feedback or questions? Let us know on social media, or reach out directly to our team!