UZIO Product Updates, October 2020

Here are UZIO's latest features that are available to you this month:

UZIO Payroll Enhancements

New UZIO Payroll State Support

UZIO Payroll is now available in all 50 U.S. states.  The following states are now supported: 

Time off Enhancements

A new Time Off accrual method has been introduced called “Flat Amount on Hours Worked”. 

You can create rules to automatically accrue time off for employees, such as 1 paid leave hour for every 30 hours worked.  Once you set up your company’s PTO accrual rules, you can assign these policies to employees. Employees will begin to accrue time off as they are paid through UZIO Payroll.  This accrual method should only be selected if you are processing payroll through UZIO Payroll. 

Based on your city or state, employers may be legally required to provide employees with paid sick leave. A new policy type, “Sick”, has been added under the field policy type. This is also a paid time off policy.

Additional Changes under the Time off policy set up

A new set of configurable rules has been added under the time off policy set up enabling users to set up the company policy as required.

• Accrual Balance Reset: In addition to the existing reset options, a new option called “Specific Day of Year” has been added. This allows employers to enter a custom date when the balance should reset for employees assigned this policy.
• Usage Waiting Period: A usage waiting period can now be configured that will determine how long an employee will have to wait before they can begin using their time off accrued.  For example, if 90 days is entered as the waiting period, an employee will be able to start using their time off on the 91st day. 
• Maximum Accrual: You can now set the limit of the leave accruals to make sure that employees do not accrue beyond a set limit during a policy year.
• Maximum Usage Limit: You can now set the maximum usage limit before the balance gets reset as defined in the policy.

“Pay as You Go” Workers’ Compensation Premium Calculation

On the UZIO payroll, you can now get your workers’ compensation insurance premiums calculated based on each payroll (referred to as “pay as you go” workers’ comp insurance). To begin using the Workers comp module, you must be subscribed for the UZIO Payroll. Once the setup is completed, UZIO payroll will automatically calculate the workers comp wages and the premium each time you process your payroll. Here is how you can set up workers comp on UZIO Payroll

Define the wages that are subject to workers comp. This can be done when you set up the earnings at the company level.

Earnings set up to define taxable Workers Comp wages

Company-level workers’ comp codes and rates  have been added and the codes assigned to each of your employees. 

Workers comp code and rate set up at the company level

Every time you process the payroll, the system will calculate Workers’ Compensation premium for each employee and will show you as another component in the Payroll cost.

You will get to see it on the cost against each code on the payroll summary page under your liabilities section.

Workers compensation amount at code level

UZIO Payroll will show the amount calculated at an employee level under your contribution section.

Employee level view of the Employer Contributions

The insurance premium payment will be the responsibility of the Employers except for Washington and Wyoming state. For Washington and Wyoming, UZIO takes responsibility to make a payment to the respective agency.

For all other states, you can download the Workers comp payroll report from the reports section with all the details including taxable wages and the premium calculated by the payroll system to reconcile and make payments with the insurance company.

Tax Override

You may have employees to whom standard tax calculation does not need to apply. UZIO payroll is updated with a new feature enabling you to do an override of the tax set up. On the Employees Federal and State taxation setup page, set the “Override Income Tax Withholding Amount” to “Yes” and then select the Override Type either as Flat dollar or % of taxable wages and set the applicable amount.

Reporting Enhancements

Report Menu Change

When accessing the Reports section, a new global navigation bar has been created on the left-hand side of the page.  Each sub-section of reports can now be expanded or contracted to view more or less reports as needed. 

Reports Layout

The standard layout of excel reports has been completely transformed to enhance the user experience. The data in reports is now more organized to make reporting cleaner and easier to use. 

Payroll Register in new format with a separate tab for report criteria

Enhanced and simplified report output

New Reports

Following new reports are added to payroll reports repository

• Payroll Allocation Report: This report is available in PDF format. An employer is able to extract payroll information (employee details, earnings, deductions, contributions, taxes and taxable wages) based on four allocation criteria:
  • By Employee
  • Department
  • Work Location State
  • Workers’ Compensation Job Code

• Payroll Cost Report: This report is available in PDF format. It gives the itemized details of total payroll cost during and post processing of the payroll run. This report replaces the existing Payroll Cost and Payroll Summary report that was available in the excel format.
• Check Payments Details Report: Similar to an existing direct deposit details report, this report gives the details of check payments made to different employees during a selected time period or for a pay period range. The report enables you to get the information of all employees who you need to issue a manual check.
• Payroll Change History Report: This report is available now to be downloaded from the “Payroll” tab of the employee profile. This will capture and highlight any changes made under employee setup in terms of changes made, date of change etc.

Report Enhancements

Following reports were enhanced to include more information:

• Payroll Register Report (PDF): Payroll register PDF version is all new now. A critical piece of information like taxable wages, Year to date amounts, employees tax withholding information has been added to it. Along with this some other information related to the employee profile has also been added to facilitate the admin’s job.
• Payroll Register Report (Excel): Taxable wages are employee information like employee SSN, address, birth date, per pay salary etc have been included. A separate tab is added to show payroll totals like active employee count, terminated employee count, total direct deposits and their amount, total checks and their amount etc.
• Group Payroll Summary To Date Report: The existing Group Year To Date report has been enhanced to Group Payroll Summary To Date report as it now shows month-to-date (MTD) and quarter-to-date (QTD) values in addition to year-to-date (YTD) values.
• Workers’ Compensation Wages Report: This report has been enhanced to show wages subject to and wages exempt from workers’ compensation in addition to gross wages and workers’ compensation amount.
• Pay Stub: Pay stub layout has been enhanced and it has a new look and feel.  It is updated to include employee’s tax withholding information.

UZIO HR Enhancements

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Linking of Multiple Employers

Companies that have other entities and have admin users across entities to manage HR functions for one or more entities, UZIO now offers the ability to link those companies on the platform for better operational management. The employer users can have access to multiple employers under a single company and can switch between employers while logged into their employer portal. 

Brokers can configure linked companies while editing an existing employer in their profile settings.

Here is how the set up can be done. Once the companies are added, at the edit employer page, an option to link the company to another company is available to begin with the set up. There is a prerequisite that the companies getting linked need to either have a status as live or partial live on the platform. Additionally, there should be a common broker in the agency assigned to the companies to complete this set up.

Manager Users Page

After linking companies, users can be assigned to one or more companies by selecting “Accessible EIN#s”.  “Accessible EIN#s” will display a list of all interlinked companies for which the user can be granted permission. 

User management for all interlinked companies is done centrally now. There is a common employer administrator. The manage user grid shows the list of all employer users in the interlinked companies, as well as which employers they have access to.  

Switch Company

Switch company feature has been added on the employer portal home page. A user can switch between its access granted interlinked companies without logging out the current session. Once a user switches the company then it can work in that company independently like before.

Global Employee Search

The broker and employer portal employee search feature has been added at the top of the page.  Brokers and employers can now search employees by name or employee ID for the employers they have access to. 

Payroll Support (new user role)

A new payroll user role has been added to the system, called Payroll Support. It will have read-only permissions for employees’ payroll information.

Update Employee Username

Brokers will be able to update the employee’s username in a self service manner. It will help the employees who can not access forgotten password links sent to their registered username(Email). The Broker user can go to the Employee listing page, click on “view username” under actions, and then update the employee’s username.  A forgot password link can be sent from the employee login page if a new password is needed. 

Common Username across all portals

The system will allow users to reuse the same email across Broker, Employer and Employee Portal. A broker who has set up themselves as a client under their agency and is also an employee on the uzio platform, all such users would be able to access the portals with the same login credentials.

Miscellaneous Product Improvements

• Manage Users has been renamed to Manage Agency Users on the broker portal. This feature is only available to the Agency administrators.
• The clients would be able to set up the employees mailing address information on the contacts page under the employee profile.
• While you rehire a terminated employee, the original date of hire would be automatically populated with the last date of hire.
• When a broker or employer is in an employee’s profile, the Action(s) drop-down will display a consistent set of actions regardless of which section of the profile you are currently on. The only exception is that payroll actions will not be displayed unless a user is in the payroll section of the profile. 
• Census for Carrier Quote Report - A report used by the broker partners to get renewal quotes from the carrier, additional types of information have been added to facilitate the information needed for quoting with insurance companies:
  • SIC Code
  • Employee ID
  • Relationship
  • Demographic information for dependents like Gender, DOB, Address
  • Coverage tier