[Product Updates] December 2025

We’ve got a substantial set of updates to wrap up the year, focusing on automation, advanced reporting, and deeper transparency for your team. Here’s a breakdown of the key improvements and fixes implemented:

Custom Payroll Exports & Reports

This is a big one! You can now fully customize your Excel and CSV pay period reports. Choose exactly which columns to display and use sophisticated formulas to fill each cell, allowing for seamless integration with almost any payroll system.

Change settings by clicking Menu > Manage Pay Periods > +Add Custom Report

Automated Pay Period Closing

Take the manual work out of your pay period wrap-ups. You can now set pay periods to automatically close after a set timeframe. You can also trigger an automatic email with the pay period report attached upon closing and set up reminder emails to go out beforehand.

Flexible Shift Trading

By popular request, supervisors can now enable the option to trade shifts of different lengths. This can be toggled under Menu » Setup » Work Policies » Work Rules.

Expanded Bid Defaults

You can now use a manually assigned schedule as the “Default Bid” or the “Protected Bid” for a schedule being put out to bid, offering even more flexibility in how you transition between schedule cycles.

Shift Change History

For greater accountability, manually edited shifts now feature a link to view a full history of changes. You can see exactly who changed what and when.

Workload Indicators

When building schedules or bidding for shifts, Hero Schedule now displays an indicator of the workload for each shift as “average hours per week,” helping employees make more informed bidding choices.

Sorting & Organization

The main schedule view can now be sorted by Badge Number.

When assigning open shifts, supervisors can now sort by the “Responses” column to easily identify shifts with the most interest.

Other Key Changes & Fixes

• Custom Reply-To Email – Using the new Organization Settings screen, you can now provide a custom “Reply To” email address for all email notifications.
• Activity Hierarchy Visuals – We’ve added “breadcrumbs” to an employee’s day view so specific activities with parent categories can be easily identified. The Color & Style screen and shift abbreviation editor now also reflect the activity hierarchy for better organization.
• Time Card Details – We’ve added overtime category rows to the time card download to ensure your exported data is as detailed as your on-screen view.
• Schedule Activation Fix – Resolved a rare issue where activating a schedule draft could inadvertently remove certain shifts.
• Inactive Worker Guardrails – Fixed an issue that allowed shifts to be created for inactive workers in certain scenarios.
• Bidding Visibility – Addressed a bug where administrators couldn’t see all ranks on very large bidding schedules.
• Time Off & Overtime UI – Improved the layout of the time off request screen and added missing validations to the overtime policy screen to prevent invalid saves.
• Search Improvements – Organization searches by email address are now correctly alphabetized.

See our developers release notes for the last two months for full details.

We are committed to continuously improving the Hero Schedule platform and always appreciate your feedback. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.