Version table effective dates!
Posted 6th January 2015
Our focus toward the end of 2014 was to cater for the new set of support salary scales that came into effect as of 1st January 2015.
These new scales are unusual compared to previous, in that different Spine Points received different increases. While Spine Points 11 and above increased by 2.2%, Spine Points 5 to 10 increased by between 2.32% and 8.56%.
These scales are now available to be applied to your budgets as ‘Support Scales - 2015 Jan’.
As you adjust your budgets to use these new scales, you will notice a major improvement to how you apply teacher and support scales. Rather than choosing a single set of scales that will be in effect over the entire time-span of your budget, you can now add multiple sets of salary scales, each with an effective date - that is, the date on which this set of salary scales will begin to be used for this budget.
Specifically, this should be used to apply the 2015 support scales to all relevant budgets. To do so, from the ‘Settings -> Budgets’ screen, edit each budget in which you wish to reflect the new scales. On the edit screen you will find a slightly modified ‘Teacher salary scales’ and ‘Support salary scales’ section with controls to add a new scale at a particular date. Click the ‘Add Support scale’ button, set the effective date as the 1st January 2015 and select ‘Support Scales - 2015 Jan’. After saving your changes, your budget will now be correctly reflecting the updated scales as of 1st January.
As always, please contact the helpdesk should you require any assistance or have any questions.
Next up
In line with the previous release, we are now looking at applying version table effective dates to National Insurance calculations. Therefore come April, rather than start a new budget, or continue using an NI table which is no longer relevant, you will be able to start using the latest NI calculations.
Furthermore, we have noticed that in the last few weeks a number of users have inadvertently deleted contracts from SBS Online in error, through the bulk actions. We are therefore working on implementing two process enhancements.
These are:
- A faster roll back process to reverse the actions
- Make bulk deletion of contracts available to users with specific access rights only. Note that the process will still be available but through the Service desk.
- Set specific signature dates (past, present and future) on Salary statements
- Have the option to include school address on Salary statements
- Have Tag names appear on PDF export cover pages
- Have a total budget count column in the Staffing contracts screen
- Ability to round numerical values to the nearest £ in all screens
