Here are six areas where that direction becomes particularly visible in the Q2 2026 release:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SunFish\u2019s new Smart Scheduler<\/strong> is designed to make that workforce planning<\/a> 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?'\"\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, the planning progresses through four structured steps before the roster itself is generated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once the requirements are reviewed and confirmed, the Scheduler<\/strong> 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<\/strong> function to regenerate the schedule automatically. When the roster is finalized, a single Publish action applies the generated shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For businesses with variable workloads, scheduling affects far more than whether every shift has a name against it. It influences labor cost, overtime, service levels and whether employees are consistently over- or under-scheduled.<\/p>\n Using historical demand and configurable planning inputs to inform workforce requirements gives managers more information before they make those decisions, while keeping the ability to review and adjust the final roster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That changes reporting in a subtle but useful way. The traditional model is: select report \u2192 generate report \u2192 read report \u2192 interpret report.<\/em> With the Q2 2026 release, SunFish adds another option: open the information \u2192 ask what you need to understand.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Q2 2026 release also brings a number of more conventional reporting improvements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of these improvements individually change the nature of reporting. Together, however, they make reports easier to manage and increasingly easier to work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A report is an intermediate step between information and a decision. Making reports easier to explore can shorten the distance between \"Here is the data\" and \"Now I understand what is happening.\" That is where reporting becomes more useful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Many of SunFish's intelligent capabilities now sit directly inside the workflow where they are useful\u2014a 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is what\u2019s new:<\/p>\n\n\n\n With SunFish Intelligence<\/strong> users now open a conversational assistant from within the application, using different interaction modes depending on the type of question. A Fast Response mode<\/em> is intended for straightforward questions where speed matters, while Deep Thinking<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Behind the user experience, SunFish Insight<\/strong> provides administrators with a centralized web-based environment for managing and monitoring the assistant \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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<\/strong> 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n That direction is extended further with the new SunFish MCP Gateway<\/strong>. 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 \u2014 but only after the user has provided consent and completed SunFish authentication. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n A generic assistant knows very little about your organization. Useful workplace assistance depends on context: company policies, employee information, application data and appropriate authorization. The more securely those pieces can be connected, the more likely it becomes that intelligent assistance can help with an actual HR question rather than simply provide a generic answer<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s offline attendance mode, and a set of user-experience refinements. Let\u2019s look at them in a little more detail:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\" \u2014 they are simply trying to submit a claim, and the technology sits inside that process to remove some of the typing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n SunFish PORT\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 it means separating attendance capture from verification when the network temporarily cannot support both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is particularly practical for factories, warehouses, retail locations and distributed sites where temporary connectivity problems should not become attendance-data problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The employee experience also receives a number of smaller refinements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Employee experience improvements often come in dozens of quiet, well tuned processes behind the scenes: less typing, clearer information, fewer unnecessary steps and fewer situations where the system gets in the way of the task. Employees experience the cumulative effect of these small interactions every day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enterprise HR software needs standardization, but standardization cannot mean forcing every organization into exactly the same process. The more common business variations that can be handled through controlled configuration, the easier the system becomes to adapt and maintain. That reduces the gap between the standard product and the way HR actually operates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014from performance and recruitment to training, hybrid-work policy and regional payroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Receives several practical additions: <\/p>\n\n\n\n1. Planning the Workforce, Not Just Filling the Roster<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Why It Matters<\/h3>\n
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With the Q2 2026 release, SunFish extends the way users can work with reports by introducing conversational assistance inside multi-datasource and combined reports<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>3. Intelligent Assistance Becomes Part of SunFish Itself<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
SunFish Intelligence <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
SunFish Insight<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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SunFish MCP Gateway<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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4. Fewer Steps in Everyday Employee Interactions<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
OCR Support in Mobile Claim Requests <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dataon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sunfish-hr-ocr-support-1024x520.webp\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dataon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sunfish-hr-port-offline-attendance-mode.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSunFish User Experience Updates<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Why It Matters<\/h3>\n
5. More Flexibility Without Turning Every Requirement into a Development Project<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n6. Talent Workflows, Policy and Regional Updates <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Performance Management<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Recruitment<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Training<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Policy & Compliance <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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