[Product Updates] August 2026

August brought two major additions to the platform: (a) certification tracking and (b) a rebuilt permission system. Here’s what shipped last month and why it matters.

Certification management

You can now track employee certifications directly in Hero Schedule by defining certification types and managing effective dates, expiration dates, approval status, certificate details, and notes. An employee’s entire certification history is available at a glance and can be imported in bulk from a spreadsheet.

Most importantly, certifications tie into scheduling: activities can require a qualification, so unqualified employees are prevented from being assigned through shift edits or overtime requests. Administrators are explicitly guided along the way, so no one gets scheduled for work they aren’t certified to perform.

A rebuilt permission system

We overhauled permissions to give you far more granular control over who can access what. Access is now managed through security roles that can be assigned organization-wide or by workforce group, making administration much simpler.

A new role matrix view lets organization admins compare role permissions side by side, which is a fast way to clean up and organize how roles are set up. We also added a dedicated permission controlling who can edit or withdraw approved overtime requests, separate from access to pending requests.

Multi-stage approval chains

Admins can now configure multi-stage, role-based approval chains for time-off and overtime requests and assign them to workforce groups. Employees and approvers get clear visibility into each request’s current stage and its full history. This is designed to keep nothing in limbo and everyone knows where a request stands.

Sharper overtime reporting

The Overtime Report now separates actual and awarded hours, shows request status, and assigns overnight requests to the period containing the request date for cleaner, more accurate totals. When the report finds a problem, it now names the affected employee and the missing election or accrual account, so setup issues are much easier to resolve. Admins can also set an overtime election and effective date for multiple employees at once.

Open shifts and fairness

A new “Total Hours Worked” rotation ranks employees by hours worked over a period for fairer open-shift assignment. Admins can now send ranked open-shift invitations one employee at a time in rotation order, with a configurable response window and automatic assignment to the first person who accepts. The open shift form also picked up improvements, including features that were previously missing from the time-off flow.

Performance and quality-of-life

Pay periods for large organizations now close in the background with visible progress, and the Accrual Balances page loads substantially faster for organizations with many employees and accounts. Bidding now shows only eligible shifts by default, schedule imports support hierarchical activity paths with clearer guidance, and the Minimum Staffing dialog gained day-to-day navigation arrows for reviewing coverage across consecutive days. Accrual overflow errors now identify the affected employee and account types, making configuration issues easier to pin down.

Looking ahead

As always, if you have questions about any of these features or want help getting them set up for your agency, our team is here to help. And if there’s something you’d love to see in Hero Schedule, let us know. Much of our product development starts as customer feedback.