2024 Engineering Recap

Summary: 

Major New Features

• Invoice Caps
• Deferred Payouts
• 1099 Filing
• Anyday Invoicing

New Features

• Pending Actions Dashboard Widget
• Roles & Permissions
• Editable Notification Templates
• Bulk Data Imports
  

Feature Updates

• New Teams UI
• Provider Deactivation Widget
• Groups Improvements
• Opportunities Improvements
• Skills Improvements
• Multiple Task Managers

Feature Request List

Summary

Over the past few years, the brilliant product and engineering teams have been defining and delivering an endless stream of new features. For 2024, we decided that it was time to revisit and review some of the features that have been part of the platform since the very beginning to address some of the feedback that we have received from users.

Additionally, we wanted to work with our clients to hear what would make their daily experience on the platform better through automation and time-saving optimisations.

Below is a recap of the feature development that our teams have delivered throughout the year. We’re excited to continue this great work in 2025 and look forward to hearing about your experiences and working closely with you to make your working days that little bit more enjoyable.

Major New Features

Invoice Caps

We’re always looking for innovative ways to save the time that managers need to spend on administrative tasks. So, when a client suggested a new feature idea to be able to set a limit on how much each provider can earn in a given period, with auto-approval of any worksheets that are within the cap, we jumped on the idea.

With the new Invoice Caps feature, managers can set a maximum value in either monetary value or billable hours that each provider can charge in a given period, such as monthly, weekly, or per billing cycle. Additionally, the configuration can be set to auto-approve any costs that are within the cap, freeing up time for managers from manually reviewing and approving all worksheets. 

Invoice Caps have been configured to be a “hard cap”, which providers cannot exceed, or “Soft Caps”, where any charges that exceed the cap are sent for manual approval.

Deferred Payouts

Not only do we consult our clients for feature ideas, but we also take on ideas from their providers. We heard from a lot of providers that they would like to be able to defer payment of their invoices in order to receive a single payment for multiple invoices at a time of their choosing.

With Deferred Payouts, each provider can elect to disable our standard Instant Payouts process to enable on-demand payouts. Our clients are invoiced as normal, and the provider can build up a balance of multiple invoices which they can then receive a single payment for with a single click of a button. These on-demand payments are issued on the same day.

1099 Filing

For our US-based clients, each January the IRS requires them to file a 1099 report for each of their US taxpaying providers. We’ve built an end-to-end solution into TalentDesk to enable our clients to do these filings accurately and easily.

US providers are requested to upload their W-9 documents and supply their Tax Identification Number (TIN) for validation. This process helps to avoid the most common problem when it comes to 1099 filings - incorrect TIN numbers.

Our 1099 feature allows approved managers to add any additional income that has been paid to any provider in the calendar year that hasn’t been recorded in TalentDesk to ensure that the filing includes all of their income.

The IRS filing response documents are downloaded and made available to the Organization for their records and to the provider for their tax filing requirements.

Anyday Invoicing

TalentDesk’s fully automated invoicing and payment system has historically offered clients the choice of weekly, bi-weekly or monthly billing cycles. While this has worked well for our clients for many years, we decided it was time to go to the next level and offer our clients the ability to choose their own custom invoicing days that suits their internal operations. .

With the introduction of Anyday Invoicing, clients can now choose between calendar dates each month or days of the week.

For example, an organization may choose to run invoicing on the 3rd, 16th, and 25th of each month or every Tuesday and Friday of each week. Invoicing will run the next business day if a calendar date falls on a weekend; however, the worksheet cutoff date will remain fixed.

New Features

Pending Actions Dashboard Widget

The TalentDesk platform has many features and can sometimes require the active user to respond or perform various tasks. These tasks can be buried without different feature areas of the platform, which is why we built the centralized Pending Actions Dashboard Widget.

This new dashboard widget brings to the fore any tasks that require the user’s action. Each listed item links directly to the area that requires the user’s attention, saving the user time and ensuring that everything is processed faster.

Roles & Permissions

Because each organization is different, so should the rules that control who can do what on the TalentDesk platform.

We have been busy this year wrapping each feature that we have with controllable permissions to give organizations the ability to finely control what each manager can and cannot do on the platform.

We created built-in system roles that mimic the way the platform permissions have always worked and provided the ability to clone or create new custom roles that allow granular permission configuration so that each organization can control what each manager can or cannot do on TalentDesk that aligns with their internal business processes.

This development is ongoing, with new permissions being made available each month. If you feel that a feature permission is missing, contact your customer success agent to suggest it be implemented.

Editable Notification Templates

The TalentDesk platform has a lot of built-in email notifications that are sent to providers when certain actions are triggered. While our template emails have been professionally crafted, each client can have differing preferences regarding how they like to correspond with their providers.

With that in mind, we have implemented a new feature that allows each organization to customize the body and subject of various automated platform emails. We additionally provide replaceable data tags for each email template where context-related data is injected into the email.

Bulk Data Imports

Last year, we introduced a new bulk data importer for worksheet data. This has been used extensively throughout the year by some clients. This year, we have added new importers for teams, projects, tasks, project/task assignments, and skills.

This enables our clients to import data from their other systems quickly and efficiently without having to develop an integration with our open API.

Feature Updates

New Teams UI

You use TalentDesk to manage your team, so we felt that it was time to invest some time in improving the look and feel of the Team area. 

We introduced a new default “Card” view of each user profile, displaying the user’s profile photo and some core information about each user. For those of us who like to see data in a more condensed format, we provided a toggle to switch to a tabular view of the team data.

Provider Deactivation Widget

Unfortunately, from time to time, it is necessary to offboard and deactivate a provider from the organization. This process can require a lot of actions to be performed before the provider can be deactivated: reviewing any pending worksheets and expenses, paying any approved service orders, removing the provider from projects and tasks, and more.

To facilitate this process, we developed the all-in-one provider deactivation form, where all pending decisions that need to be made are presented to the manager on one page. We provide quick and simple tools to action any tasks that require manual intervention, and automate those that don’t.

Groups Improvements

This year, we decided that our Groups feature needed some upgrades. We improved the user interface, added support for filtering provider lists by groups, and, most importantly, introduced Dynamic Groups.

With Dynamic Groups, managers can create groups that will automatically include or remove group members based on one or more attributes, such as Skills, Languages, or residential Country.

Opportunities Improvements

Project Opportunities received some user interface improvements this year that redesigned the editing form, introduced the ability to set applicant rate guidance values, and provided a new place to manage invitees to the opportunity. We also spruced up the application review process. 

We’re not stopping there, though. Next year, we plan to make more changes to Opportunities, including new functionality for publicly sharing and accepting applications from non-platform users.

Skills Improvements

The TalentDesk platform provides thousands of built-in skills and functionality for organizations to create custom skills that do not appear in our system skills.

We updated the user interface for managing skills and, importantly, introduced the ability to filter provider lists by their skills. We have also introduced a quick filter feature on projects that, with a single click, will filter the list of providers by the skills defined on the project.

Multiple Task Managers

Historically, each project task on TalentDesk could only have one manager. However, many clients have expressed interest in having multiple managers for any given task, so we have delivered.

Along with some key user interface improvements for tasks, we have created a new area to manage the list of managers for a task.

Feature Request List

While we have a stacked development roadmap each year, we believe that it is important to continually listen to clients for changes that will quickly improve their daily interaction with the TalentDesk platform. We review client feature requests bi-weekly and try to fit these requests into our development where possible. Below is a selection of some of the client feature requests that we delivered in 2024:

• Ability for managers to control which email notifications they receive
• Ability for providers to hide their tax identification number
• Ability for providers to raise worksheets with a billing period older than 30 days old
• Ability to add a provider to a task rather than Invite them
• Ability to add multiple managers to a task
• Ability to add multiple managers to multiple projects at once - bulk action
• Ability to add notes to Contacts
• Ability to assign new legal contracts to existing, approved providers in my network
• Ability to assign project managers to tasks in bulk
• Ability to attach multiple files to Proforma Invoices
• Ability to change the document contract that has been sent to a provider for their onboarding
• Ability to close a project without having to complete all child tasks
• Ability to create additional custom task statuses
• Ability to customize the notification message a provider receives when a task they are on is completed
• Ability to disable the Suggest a Rate feature when a manager invites a provider to a task
• Ability to edit or update my Organization's Skills through settings
• Ability to filter projects and tasks by skills
• Ability to filter worksheets by the billing date
• Ability to have a fixed rate amount guide for Opportunity applicants
• Ability to identify if a provider is on TalentDesk's AOR service from their profile
• Ability to import worksheets at a task level, not just project level
• Ability to manage the invitees for Opportunities
• Ability to preview signed documents in an embedded PDF viewer
• Ability to remove specific onboarding steps
• Ability to remove the task progress bar
• Ability to reopen completed tasks and projects
• Ability to search for worksheets by the worksheet number
• Ability to set the default rate for providers
• Ability to track service order amendment history 
• Ability to use a custom rate when inviting a provider to a task
• Ability to view an AOR contract within the platform
• Ability to delete or archive contract templates
• Add a new filter for Stopped tasks
• Add a setting to make the SSN field optional for providers in the Invoicing and Tax Information onboarding step.
• Add a timeline for when automated email reminder notifications are sent to providers.
• Add a worksheet filter for whether it has been invoiced
• Add a column to the worksheet export showing approval/rejection comments 
• Additions to the Budget Spent Per Project and User report 
• Custom report - Budget Allocated
• Custom report - Invoice Breakdown Report
• Custom report - Provider Rates
• Custom report - Providers with no worksheets
• Custom report - Time Tracker data
• Custom report - User tax forms
• Display the status of provider worksheets to managers
• Display the task name on the notification I receive when worksheets are raised, not just the project name
• Do not display providers who have been removed from a task on the assignee list
• Do not invite providers to the project when they are invited to a task
• Hide providers' address being displayed to other providers
• Hide rejected tax forms in the list view if the provider resubmits a new one
• Information explaining why it is important to claim US Citizenship for tax filing purposes
• Manager permission to action (void, request an amendment, cancel, approve) all expenses
• Managers to receive a notification when a provider submits a tax form
• Notify providers when their AOR contract has been terminated
• Option to select a date on which my worksheet should be processed after
• Permission to review IRS Taxpayer information forms by default
• Permissions to give individual managers permission to approve expenses
• Provider progress bar displaying the number of hours logged
• See the date/time stamp an Invitee was sent their invitation
• Setting to disable messaging within task Discussions
• Support for providers to have multiple 1099 forms if they operate under multiple tax entities
• Trigger payment of any deferred invoices when a provider is deactivated
• When adjusting the default rate for a provider, apply it to any active tasks that the provider has