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What’s New in Go Casual — May 2026

Updated May 2026 Updates 3 min read

Brett Ransley By Brett Ransley • 27 May 2026
Written by the GoCasual team - helping New Zealand businesses simplify payroll and stay compliant.
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27 May 2026 • Product Update

What’s New in Go Casual — May 2026

A big round of improvements based on your feedback. Here’s everything that shipped this month.

✅ Employee Leave Requests

Employees can now request leave directly from their portal — Sick Leave, Annual Leave, Lieu Days, and Bereavement Leave. Requests land in a new Adjustments & Leave inbox for the employer to review and approve. When approved, the employee receives an automatic email confirmation.

✅ New Adjustments & Leave Index

We replaced the old “create only” adjustments screen with a full /adjustments page. You can now see all adjustments at a glance — pending, approved, and locked into a pay run — with approve, unapprove, and delete actions in one place. Leave requests submitted by employees are clearly labelled so you know where they came from.

✅ Leave Balances on the Employee Dashboard

Employees now see their current Sick Leave, Annual Leave, and Lieu Day balances on their dashboard as soon as they log in. No more asking their employer “how many sick days do I have left?” — it’s right there.

✅ Holiday Pay Breakdown on Payslips

For employees on Holiday Pay Option 1 (where holiday pay is already included in the hourly rate), payslips now show the exact dollar split:

Base earnings: $331.25  +  Holiday pay (8%): $26.50  =  Total: $357.75

No more wondering what portion of the pay is holiday pay — it’s spelled out clearly.

✅ Pay Run Unlock

Made a mistake on a pay run? You can now unlock it. Unlocking reverses all leave adjustments, releases time entries back to the approvals queue, and returns the pay run to draft so you can correct the dates or entries and re-lock when ready.

✅ ANZ Payment File Format Updated

The ANZ bank direct credit export now uses the 9-field CSV format confirmed to work with ANZ Business Online. If you’ve had trouble uploading payment files to ANZ, this should resolve it. Westpac and BNZ continue to use the standard Deskbank format.

✅ KiwiSaver 3.5% Minimum

Following the government change effective 1 April 2026, KiwiSaver contribution fields now accept half-percent increments (3.5%, 4%, etc.) and the default has been updated to 3.5% for both employer and employee. The in-app guidance text has also been updated to reflect the new legal minimums.

✅ Smarter Dashboard & Notifications

A few quality-of-life improvements:

  • The Timesheets sidebar badge now shows a combined count of pending timesheets and pending adjustments.
  • The employer dashboard has a new Pending Leave Requests stat card that turns red when action is needed.
  • Multiple “Timesheet Submitted” notifications are now consolidated into a single notice instead of stacking.
  • Stale timesheet notifications are automatically dismissed once all timesheets have been processed.

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