Flexibility in Dynamics 365 Human Resources supports your unique HR needs

Dynamics 365 Human Resources 2020 release wave 1 includes investments in benefits management, leave and absence, and deeper integration with Common Data Service, providing your organization with a flexible solution that supports a wide variety of HR options.

Benefits management enhancements

Enhanced plan configuration

Benefit plans often have different costs depending on the characteristics of the policy holder. For example, life insurance rates can vary based on gender and age. With our benefits capabilities, you can set up complex rate tables to capture differences in rates for age, salary, gender, full-time equivalent designation, job type, compensation region, and compensation level.

Benefits can be bundled together to ensure that employees select the correct prerequisite plans before selecting dependent plans, enabling a seamless self-serve experience. These enhancements allow HR professionals to offer a richer set of plans to employees.

Efficient administration

With additional flexibility often comes complexity, which is why we have focused on providing an efficient administration process. Plans are configurable to enable auto enrollment based on the previous year enrollments. Life events that are listed in IRS section 125 are supported, as well as other events such as the ability to age out of benefits, loss of spousal coverage, or employee address changes.
Administrators can choose which life events to process and how to process them by plan type, so they can administer benefits based on unique company and regulatory policies. Employees can self-serve via a guided open enrollment shopping cart experience.

Extensive eligibility setup

Benefits management provides the flexibility to set up multiple types of eligibility rules and coverage options. Benefits managers can easily create flexible and robust eligibility rules that ensure the right benefits are available for the right employees in an easy-to-use experience. Additional employment category fields within the eligibility process ensure that a company's unique eligibility rules can be accommodated.

Flex credit programs

Flex credit programs allow companies to showcase the cost of benefits to employees. These new programs also provide employees with more control over the way they spend their benefit dollars to support unique needs across the workforce. In addition, flex credits can be prorated to support mid period enrollment or other life event changes.

For more information, see Benefits management overview.

Leave and absence enhancements

Create leave rules to meet company and regulatory policies

Whether driven by company policy or regulations required by the government, organizations need to be able to configure a leave and absence program that fits their business processes. Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides the flexibility to configure leave and absence programs, including the ability to:

• Automatically adjust leave for public holiday corrections and streamline the accrual process by automatically adjusting employee balances, instead of needing time-consuming and error-prone manual updates.
• Accrue based on full-time equivalent (FTE) to allow for a single leave plan to be used for full-time and part-time employees.
• Round leave balances to provide employees with a better understanding of the days they have available for time off requests.

Review who is and isn’t at work using calendars

Being able to see who is and isn’t at work helps managers determine which requests should be approved. It also gives HR a view into who is taking time off and when. Dynamics 365 Human Resources supports not only managers and HR with a calendar view of time off, but employees as well. These calendars can be configured to show pending and approved time off, as well as when a calendar is available to view.

For more information, see Leave and absence management overview.

Additional human resources data available in Common Data Service

Extending the human resources data available in Common Data Service continues to be a priority. Dynamics 365 Human Resources 2020 release wave 1 includes a new solution that expands existing entities to include more data (like financial dimensions) and new entities have been added to enable partners and customers to continue to extend Dynamics 365 Human Resources.

For more information about the human resources data now available in Common Data Service, see What’s new in the March 19 2020 release.

Continued investments in public preview

As we continue to invest in Dynamics 365 Human Resources, new capabilities are being added regularly. Capabilities available in preview that you can try out today include:

Leave suspension – You can suspend leave and absence for an employee. Suspending leave stops the leave accruals for selected leave types. If the suspension occurs after an accrual has been processed, suspending leave will create a prorated adjustment to the employee’s leave balance.

For more information, see Suspend leave.

Carry forward rules – You can specify a carry forward leave type for carry forward balances where carry forward adjustments are transferred to. For example, if an employee carries forward 10 days, you can pick a different leave type for those 10 days.

For more information, see Configure leave and absence types.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Learn more about what’s new and planned for 2020 release wave 1 includingnew benefit plan configurations. Explore more ways your HR team canaccess workforce insights needed to build data-driven employee experiences across HR functions including compensation, benefits, leave and absence, compliance, payroll integrations, performance feedback, training and certifications, and self-service programs.

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