In the coming December release, the employee data will include a new Ethnicities field reflecting a new employee profile field in Bob.

Why this change?

With the introduction of the new Ethnicities list field, employees can now select multiple races instead of being limited to a single option. This new field is also available through the public API.

What is being changed?

The current Ethnicity field (eeo.ethnicity) will remain available for use with Bob’s Search for employees public API for another six months, alongside the new Ethnicities field (employee.ethnicities).

To fetch the old and new field properties, use the Field Metadata endpoint.

Timeline of Changes

• December 17, 2024: new Ethnicities field will be introduced.
  • If you use the API to retrieve values from the old Ethnicity field, the returned value will be sourced from the new Ethnicities field.
  • If you use the API to update values in the old Ethnicity field, those values will be automatically copied to the new Ethnicities field.
• June, 2025: old ethnicities field will be deprecated.
  • If you will use the old ethnicities field in your APIs you will get an error.

❗️

Deprecation notice for the current Ethnicity field

Developers will have until June 2025 to adjust their APIs to use the new ethnicities field when pulling data and updating it.

To learn more about the new ethnicities field, see this post in Bob's Heartcore HR Community.

Two new endpoints were introduced for the Workforce Planning module:

Read Position Openings

A new Read company position opening endpoint was added to the Workforce Planning API, allowing you to search for

position openings filtered by status and name. This endpoint supports pagination to allow the fastest and most reliable way to handle many items.

To learn more, see Read company positions openings.

Read Positions Budgets

A new Read positions budget endpoint was added to the Workforce Planning API.

This endpoint returns a list of company position budgets and their details, filtered by the budget ID. This endpoint supports pagination, allowing the fastest and most reliable way to handle many items.

To learn more, see Read company positions budgets.

The 'Get Policy Details' endpoint now includes a new 'bookingWorkDaysOnly' property.

The Time off policy now allows users to define Days that can be requested at the Policy level (instead of the Policy Type). To reflect this change in the public API, the 'bookingWorkDaysOnly' property was added to the Policy details. This boolean property specifies whether non-working days (e.g., weekends and public holidays) are deducted from the balance.

Notes:

• Policies created before this release will continue to return the original value inherited from the relevant Policy Type.
• Newly created policy types will hold the default value 'true' until we deprecate this property from the 'Get Policy Type Details' endpoint in May 2025.

To learn more, see Get policy details.

A new public API endpoint has been added to the Employee Tables endpoints: Actual Payments Search.

This endpoint enables efficient searches for actual payment entries within the Actual Payment table, located under the Payroll category for each employee.

By including employee IDs directly in your request, you can retrieve payment details for multiple employees at once. With pagination support, this endpoint easily manages large data sets, and you can refine your search further by filtering payments based on pay date.

To learn more, see Search for Actual Payments.

The Attendance API now supports a new entry type parameter: ‘work’ or ‘break’.

You can now import manual 'break' entries through the Attendance API. Manual breaks allow employees to record their breaks manually, which is done in the app by clicking the coffee cup icon.

Manual breaks are supported only when imported in "immediate" mode and require a policy that allows manual breaks.

To learn more, see Import attendance data.

The GET endpoints for time off requests now include a new visibility property, indicating how the request is visible based on its associated policy. The possible visibility values are:

• Public
• Custom name
• Private

Reminder: Before accessing time off data, ensure that the service user has the necessary permissions to view this information, as you would when assigning permissions to a user in Bob.

Relevant endpoints:

• Get the details of an existing time off request.
• Get all new/deleted time off requests since the specified date.
• Read a list of who's out of the office.
• Read a list of who's out of the office today or on the specified date.

To learn more, see Time off API.

We've improved service users management to give Bob admins better control over permissions and more transparency.

Now, you can easily access detailed information about service users, including:

• Who created the user
• The date of the last session
• The date of the last token refresh
• Assigned permission groups
• Specific permissions granted

Additionally, you can add a description to each service user, quickly copy the service user ID with a single click using the clipboard icon, and export the entire table, including permissions, to a .csv or .xlsx file.

To learn more, see Manage service users.

The 'Submit a New Time Off Request' endpoint now supports requests with specific hours through the Public API. This new feature allows you to define exact times for the time off request, such as 12:15 to 14:15.

Please note that this request type allows you to provide a specific time for the entire date range.

To learn more, see Submit a new time off request.

To support users who want to update employee data via the Public API, we have published a new article that covers all you need to know when using the 'Update company employee' endpoint.

1. The steps to update employee fields via the API.
2. Fetching field metadata and data and finding the field's JSON structure.
3. How to set Service Users permissions.
4. How to update custom columns.
5. The difference between fields and columns.

Whether you're already deep into your development process or just getting started, we hope this guide becomes a valuable resource.

To learn more, see Update employee data.

The endpoints that list an employee's work entries were updated to accurately reflect the fields being returned in the response by this endpoint, and include additional error codes being returned.

To learn more, see the endpoints:

• List employee's work history.
• List work history for a list of employees.