You now have the option to enter the Date of Birth for your staff member in the Staff Info page. This feature will send an email notification to the manager of your Portal seven days prior to the staff member having their birthday. This will save you having to remember everyone's birthdates and flags you to change the wage level if needed.

Simply go to the Staff Info page and enter the Date of Birth's as needed or Staff can also update their own details in the My Info page. As a sidenote, Roster Portal will also send a 'Happy Birthday' email to each staff member on their birthday.

You no longer need to send an SMS to see how many credits you have remaining. While in the Admin section of your portal, go to the Contact SMS/Email page and beside the Approximate SMS Credits to Send heading you should see "0 Credits out of XYZ available".

"XYZ" is how many credits you have available to use, keeping in mind that Roster Portal will let you go to minus 80 credits free of charge before preventing you from sending further SMS's.

To simplify the headings in the Admin navigation, we have moved both the Logs Staff and Logs SMS/Email links to more appropriate headings. You will now see an 'Activity' link in the 'Staff' section (this was originally 'Logs_Staff') and a 'Logs' link in the 'Contact' section (this was originally 'Logs_SMS/Email').

See the below screenshot for the new positions and all functionality behind these links remains the same.

Roster Portal was originally written with what you would call a 'birds nest' of software code where new features were bolted on piece by piece... not good programming practice! Everything worked back then but under load there was the potential for the program to be very slow and ultimately crash. In 2011 the whole program was rewritten to world class standards and there is now over 10,000 lines of code to give you the user friendly platform you see today.

As technology continues to change we are in process updating to Roster Portal 'Version 3' which is only behind the scenes changes. We do thorough testing on any new feature but please bear with us if there is the occasional bug which we will rectify asap. As always, to ensure an optimum user experience, we highly recommend using the latest version of Google Chrome, Firefox or if necessary Internet Explorer (version 11) as your web browser.

Until next month,
Kind Regards,
The Roster Portal Team