SunFish Q2 2026 Update: Making Everyday HR Work Smarter and Easier

At DataOn, we believe that HR software earns its value in the everyday moments when work would otherwise be manual, repetitive or unnecessarily complicated. Whether that is building a shift roster when staffing needs change, or interpreting what a report is actually telling you, or recording attendance when a site temporarily loses its internet connection; HR technology is largely there to simplify work and make information easier to use. 

These are the moments where good HR technology makes a tangible difference to the people using it every day. They are also the ones many of the SunFish Q2 2026 enhancements are focused on. 

Across workforce planning, reporting, employee transactions, configuration, attendance and regional HR compliance, this quarter’s enhancements aim to help users complete tasks in fewer steps, better understand the data they already have, and manage increasingly complex HR processes more easily.

This release builds on the foundation established in the SunFish HR Q1 2026 product updates, which strengthened security, mobile workflows, reporting, compliance, and practical AI capabilities.

Here are six areas where that direction becomes particularly visible in the Q2 2026 release:

1. Planning the Workforce, Not Just Filling the Roster

Workforce scheduling can become difficult very quickly when demand changes from one day to the next. For example, a flash sale drives unexpected traffic, or an event or holiday triggers unplanned room and restaurant bookings. In these situations, a manager may know how many employees are available, but that is not necessarily the same as knowing how many people are actually required, and which roles are needed to cover the spike. 

SunFish’s new Smart Scheduler is designed to make that workforce planning process more systematic. Instead of asking, ‘Who can I put into these empty shifts?’, it begins one step earlier: ‘Based on expected demand, how many people, and which roles, are we likely to need?'” 

From there, the planning progresses through four structured steps before the roster itself is generated:

• Historical Data — analysis of previous demand trends drawn from the selected historical period.
• Forecast — a prediction of expected future demand based on that history.
• Demand Plan — where the manager can adjust the forecasted demand before it becomes the operational input.
• Requirements — automatically generated from the approved demand plan, showing the workforce required by role and shift.

Once the requirements are reviewed and confirmed, the Scheduler stage generates employee schedules based on the employees and roles within the scheduling group. Managers can review employee working hours, drag and drop shifts where manual changes are needed, or use the Reshuffle function to regenerate the schedule automatically. When the roster is finalized, a single Publish action applies the generated shifts.

2. Getting from HR Data to an Answer More Quickly

HR systems have become very good at producing data. The harder part is often determining what that data actually means. A user may need to know which report to open, understand how the report is structured, identify the relevant columns and then interpret the result before getting to the question they were originally trying to answer.

With the Q2 2026 release, SunFish extends the way users can work with reports by introducing conversational assistance inside multi-datasource and combined reports. 

Instead of only reading the report, users can ask questions about the information already in front of them. They can start with predefined question templates or type in their own questions, which makes the capability useful without requiring everyone to know how to construct a detailed prompt. Combined reports work in a similar way, allowing multiple reports to be included in a single request so a user can ask a question across a broader set of information rather than analyzing each report separately.

That changes reporting in a subtle but useful way. The traditional model is: select report → generate report → read report → interpret report. With the Q2 2026 release, SunFish adds another option: open the information → ask what you need to understand.

The Q2 2026 release also brings a number of more conventional reporting improvements:

• Users gain additional control over visible and sortable columns in multi-datasource reports through a combined Manage Column feature, while
• Report previews and printed reports can now carry configurable text or image watermarks. These support dynamic keywords such as [EMP_NAME], [EMP_NO], [TODAY], [NOW] and [CONAME], helping organizations apply more consistent labeling and document controls.
• Other refinements improve report scrolling performance, band-based font control, filter visibility across combined reports, custom prompt validation and configurable report timeouts.

None of these improvements individually change the nature of reporting. Together, however, they make reports easier to manage and increasingly easier to work with.

3. Intelligent Assistance Becomes Part of SunFish Itself

Many of SunFish’s intelligent capabilities now sit directly inside the workflow where they are useful—a report, a claim or a recruitment interaction. The Q2 2026 release also expands that approach across SunFish itself, with conversational assistance for users, administrative tools for managing it, and a secure integration layer for connecting authorized external platforms. 

Here is what’s new:

SunFish Intelligence

With SunFish Intelligence users now open a conversational assistant from within the application, using different interaction modes depending on the type of question. A Fast Response mode is intended for straightforward questions where speed matters, while Deep Thinking allows more time for questions requiring greater analysis. Users can also regenerate answers, copy responses, provide feedback or expand the assistant into a larger working view.

SunFish Insight

Behind the user experience, SunFish Insight provides administrators with a centralized web-based environment for managing and monitoring the assistant — including today’s conversation volume, active users, feedback ratings, and success versus error rates for form submissions. This gives administrators operational visibility into how the assistant is being used and how users are responding to it.

Knowledge Center and eHelp Datasources

The Q2 2026 release also expands the information sources that can support intelligent assistance across SunFish. Internal help information, predefined FAQs and company documents can be configured as knowledge sources. SunFish can use internal help information, predefined FAQs and company documents as knowledge sources. FAQs allow organizations to maintain controlled answers to common questions, while client documents act as a source of truth for the assistant, using content from SunFish Company Policy or documents uploaded through SunFish Insight

SunFish MCP Gateway

That direction is extended further with the new SunFish MCP Gateway. It acts as an orchestration layer between AI agents and SunFish MCP servers, handling routing, authentication, authorization and communication standardization. Authorized external platforms can retrieve selected SunFish information across attendance, leave, employee data, performance, training, loans, organizational documents and E-Help — but only after the user has provided consent and completed SunFish authentication. 

4. Fewer Steps in Everyday Employee Interactions

Some of the most useful improvements happen inside tasks employees already perform every day. Examples include the enhancements for OCR support in mobile claim requests, SunFish PORT’s offline attendance mode, and a set of user-experience refinements.  Let’s look at them in a little more detail:

OCR Support in Mobile Claim Requests

When an employee submits a claim, supporting documents can be used to populate information in the form. Employees can upload up to five attachments, select which document should be processed, and have fields such as Amount, Valid Amount and Remark automatically populated from the extracted data. The employee is not running an “OCR process” — they are simply trying to submit a claim, and the technology sits inside that process to remove some of the typing.

SunFish PORT’s Offline Attendance

SunFish PORT’s Q2 2026 improvement addresses a very different everyday problem: what happens when attendance devices lose connectivity? To solve that issue, SunFish PORT now moves into offline attendance mode automatically when the device loses its internet connection. Attendance information is stored locally rather than being lost, and records synchronize when connectivity returns.

Face verification is handled carefully in that process. In online mode it takes place in real time. In offline mode, the attendance transaction can still be captured, while face verification is deliberately deferred and completed automatically in the background after the device reconnects. Offline operation should not mean removing the control — it means separating attendance capture from verification when the network temporarily cannot support both.

This is particularly practical for factories, warehouses, retail locations and distributed sites where temporary connectivity problems should not become attendance-data problems.

SunFish User Experience Updates

The employee experience also receives a number of smaller refinements:

• The SunFish homepage now supports a more customizable widget experience, with widgets organized across left, middle and right sections and administrators able to restrict which widgets may be edited or moved. 
• Reminders can be prioritized (Low, Medium, High) and bookmarked, with color-coded badges. Mobile users can crop images before submitting them as attachments. 

5. More Flexibility Without Turning Every Requirement into a Development Project

No two organizations run HR in exactly the same way. There will always be different approval structures, internal processes, access requirements, forms and administrative conventions. The challenge for enterprise software is accommodating those differences without turning every requirement into a custom development project. And in the Q2 2026 release, several enhancements are geared towards closing the gap between standardization and customization:

• The new Page Builder gives implementation teams and system administrators more room to create and adapt application pages without changing the standard front-end code. The design allows implementation teams to define page structure, routing, rendered components and basic page behavior through configuration.
• A reusable Component Library helps standardize elements that can be used across different pages. Page Builder can also create its own access configuration where the required access is not yet available, helping the page and its permissions remain connected as part of the implementation process.
• Dynamic position-based letter approval allows an approval request to be routed to all eligible employees according to position, with the first completed approval closing the step and automatically cancelling the remaining requests.
• Function Access Groups become more flexible: administrators can assign members directly, define them dynamically through SQL-based rules, or use employee filters, making permission management easier to maintain as organizations grow or change. A tree-based Group Access view now makes hierarchical Read/Edit/Add/Delete permissions easier to review.
• Companies can also maintain their own multilingual email templates — English, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese — while retaining system defaults.
• Administrators gain centralized controls for code numbering, generated files and permitted upload types and sizes, all now brought into the SunFish Setting interface for more centralized administration.
• Within Document Management, users can submit documents for approval directly from DMS and track the resulting request through the Inbox.

These enhancements reflect the same product direction: allowing more of the way an organization works to be represented through configuration. More complex requirements will still require backend development or customization, but the Page Builder moves considerably more of the front-end structure and configuration into the implementation layer.

6. Talent Workflows, Policy and Regional Updates 

Many SunFish enhancements are shaped by customer feedback, user experience and changing operational requirements. The Q2 2026 release brings that input meaningfully into several areas of the platform—from performance and recruitment to training, hybrid-work policy and regional payroll.

Performance Management

• The ESS and Periodic Performance dashboards have been split: one giving employees visibility into their own performance against targets and historical trends, the other giving HR consolidated insights across the organization. 
• The 360 Evaluation now supports role-based weighting, with configurable weights per rater role determining the contribution of each role to the final evaluation score. 
• A new Self role allows employees to complete a self-assessment as part of the same evaluation. 
• A single assessment can now combine Appraisal, Competency and 360 components, with the final score calculated using the configured weights. 
• Additional improvements include Mass Lookup configuration for KPI Library goals and a new Performance Planning Report.

Recruitment

• Adds an Online Recruitment Chatbot that helps applicants find the vacancy best suited to their expertise, based on their inquiry and match percentage after logging in. 
• An Applicant Match Percentage Filter on the Recruitment Overview and User-Defined Applicant Report makes it easier to sort candidates by their pre-screening match score. 
• A Recruitment Request Changes Log records activity across the form, and email templates now support variable substitution in the subject line.

Training

Receives several practical additions: 

• Automated Renewal Training Reminder Emails with configurable schedules, 
• a Mass Evaluation feature that lets instructors evaluate multiple participants in a single action, 
• a new Dichotomous (Yes/No) Question Type for Training Feedback and Evaluation, 
• a Day-based renewal duration option, filtering enhancements to the Training Calendar, and 
• Quiz-review improvements (quiz switcher, passing-score visibility).

Policy & Compliance

• The new Work From Home policy type extends SunFish beyond the existing Work From Anywhere policy. Organizations can configure WFH by Number of Days (weekly or monthly quotas) or Specific Days (fixed patterns — for example, allowing WFH every Friday). Attendance validation checks the configured address and geolocation, determines whether the employee is within the permitted WFH or work-location radius, and then applies the WFH quota or specific-day rule.
• For Malaysia, we added support for the SKBBK contribution (including payroll component and payslip reporting), Multiple Zakat Center Allocation (fixed amount or percentage across defined periods), and Fixed and Additional Tax Configuration for greater flexibility in payroll adjustments. 
• Other localization changes include:
  • Singapore’s repeated childcare-leave calculation based on child citizenship and age, and 
  • Improvements to leave-entitlement calculation when employees transfer between companies
  • Thailand’s For Yor For Por 3 / FYFP 3 Training Statutory Report can now be exported to Excel. 

Elsewhere Across the Platform

• CRM adds a Company Name Similarity Check to prevent duplicate records, a Reopen-to-Prospect action for miscategorized companies, and richer CRM Opportunity Reports. 
• Helpdesk tightens attachment permissions and improves position search for admins. 
• Project Management adds category-based filtering and richer Edit Task views. 
• The framework itself continues to improve, with faster selected endpoints, Inbox previews for PDF/Image/DOCX/Excel files, improved cron task status display, a Show/Hide PIN toggle, and DMS document search by request status.

The Q2 2026 SunFish Updates in Perspective

The Q2 2026 release advances many areas of SunFish in the same direction.

Workforce scheduling starts with a better understanding of demand. Reports become easier to interpret rather than simply easier to generate. Intelligent assistance gains access to the organizational context that can make it useful, while administrators retain visibility and control over how that assistance is managed. Everyday employee transactions require fewer unnecessary steps. More business requirements can be handled through configuration. And local HR rules continue to be maintained as regulations and operating practices evolve.

That is how we think HR technology should develop naturally, and new technology is integrated where it makes work simpler and helps solve existing problems more effectively. For Q2 2026, that meant continuing to make SunFish easier to work with in the places where HR work is genuinely complicated.

Please note that this article is not intended to cover every item in the full SunFish Q2 2026 Update release. Customers who would like to review the complete feature update can contact their SunFish representative for the release material.