SunFish HR Q2 2026 brings a wave of enhancements built around one idea. HR software should earn its value in the everyday moments where work is manual, repetitive, or unnecessarily complicated. This release from SunFish HR by DataOn spans workforce scheduling, AI-powered reporting, employee transactions, configuration, and regional compliance. Together, these updates help HR teams complete tasks in fewer steps and manage complex processes with less friction.
Smarter Workforce Scheduling with Smart Scheduler
SunFish’s new Smart Scheduler moves workforce planning beyond simply filling empty shifts. Instead of asking who is available, it starts one step earlier. Based on expected demand, how many people and which roles does the business actually need?
How the Planning Process Works
The tool works through four structured steps. First, it analyses historical demand. Then it forecasts future needs. Managers can adjust the demand plan before it becomes the operational input, and the system generates workforce requirements by role and shift.
Once requirements are confirmed, the Scheduler stage builds employee schedules automatically. Managers can still review hours, drag and drop shifts, or use the Reshuffle function to regenerate the roster before publishing it. For businesses with variable workloads, this directly affects labour cost, overtime, and service levels, giving managers better information before they commit to a schedule.
Faster Answers from HR Reports
SunFish HR Q2 2026 also changes how users interact with reports. Rather than reading through a report to interpret it, users can now ask questions directly within multi-datasource and combined reports. They can use predefined templates or type their own questions. This shifts reporting from “generate, read, interpret” to simply asking what you need to understand.
Additional Reporting Improvements
The release also adds practical reporting tools. A Manage Column feature gives users more control over multi-datasource reports. Configurable text or image watermarks now support dynamic keywords, and combined reports benefit from better scrolling performance and clearer filter visibility.
Intelligent Assistance Built Into SunFish HR
Many of SunFish’s intelligent capabilities now sit directly inside the workflow where they’re useful, whether that’s a report, a claim, or a recruitment interaction. This quarter’s release expands that approach across SunFish itself, adding conversational assistance for users, administrative tools for managing it, and a secure integration layer for connecting authorised external platforms.
SunFish Intelligence
Users now open a conversational assistant from within the application through SunFish Intelligence, choosing between different interaction modes depending on the question. A Fast Response mode suits straightforward questions where speed matters, while Deep Thinking allows more time for questions that need greater analysis. Beyond asking questions, users can regenerate answers, copy responses, provide feedback, or expand the assistant into a larger working view when they need more space.
SunFish Insight
Administrators get their own layer of control through SunFish Insight, a centralised web-based environment for managing and monitoring the assistant. This includes visibility into today’s conversation volume, active users, feedback ratings, and success versus error rates for form submissions. With this operational view, administrators can see not just whether the assistant is being used, but how users are actually responding to it.
SunFish MCP Gateway
The release also introduces the SunFish MCP Gateway, an orchestration layer that lets authorised external platforms securely retrieve SunFish information. This includes attendance, leave, and performance data, but only after user consent and authentication. Alongside this, Knowledge Center and eHelp datasources let organisations configure internal FAQs and company documents as knowledge sources for the assistant.
Fewer Steps in Everyday Employee Tasks
Some of the most useful improvements happen inside tasks employees already perform every day. This quarter’s enhancements focus on removing friction from routine actions, not adding new ones. Two updates stand out: OCR support in mobile claim requests, and SunFish PORT’s offline attendance mode.
OCR Support in Mobile Claim Requests
Supporting documents can now populate a claim form automatically when an employee submits one. Employees upload up to five attachments and select which document to process. Fields like Amount, Valid Amount, and Remark then fill in from the extracted data. The employee isn’t running an “OCR process.” They’re simply trying to submit a claim, and the technology sits quietly inside that process to remove some of the typing.
Claims count among the most repetitive employee-facing tasks in any HR system, which makes this update matter. Reducing manual data entry, even by a few fields per submission, adds up quickly across an organisation.
SunFish PORT’s Offline Attendance
A different everyday problem gets addressed in SunFish PORT’s Q2 2026 update: what happens when an attendance device loses connectivity? SunFish PORT now switches into offline attendance mode automatically when this happens. The system stores attendance information locally instead of losing it, then syncs records once connectivity returns.
Face verification gets handled carefully in this process. Online mode processes it in real time, while offline mode still captures the attendance transaction and defers face verification until the device reconnects. Factories, warehouses, retail locations, and distributed sites benefit most from this change, since a temporary connectivity issue no longer needs to become a bigger attendance-data problem.
More Configuration Flexibility
SunFish HR Q2 2026 closes the gap between standard product and custom development with several configuration-first tools. The new Page Builder lets implementation teams build application pages without touching front-end code, supported by a reusable Component Library.
Access and Localisation Updates
Function Access Groups become more flexible with dynamic SQL-based rules. Companies can also maintain their own multilingual email templates across English, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese. Within Document Management, users can now submit documents for approval directly and track requests through the Inbox.
Regional Payroll and Compliance Updates
Many SunFish enhancements are shaped directly by customer feedback, user experience, and changing operational requirements. The SunFish HR Q2 2026 release brings that input into several areas of the platform, spanning performance, recruitment, training, hybrid-work policy, and regional payroll.
Performance Management
The ESS and Periodic Performance dashboards have been split. Employees get visibility into their own performance against targets and trends, while HR gets consolidated insights across the organisation. The 360 Evaluation now supports role-based weighting, with configurable weights per rater role determining each role’s contribution to the final score. A new Self role lets employees complete a self-assessment as part of the same evaluation, and a single assessment can now combine Appraisal, Competency, and 360 components into one calculated score.
Recruitment
This quarter adds an Online Recruitment Chatbot that helps applicants find vacancies suited to their expertise, based on their inquiry and match percentage after logging in. An Applicant Match Percentage Filter on the Recruitment Overview makes it easier to sort candidates by pre-screening score. A Recruitment Request Changes Log now tracks activity across the form.
Training
Training receives several practical additions. These include automated Renewal Training Reminder Emails with configurable schedules, and a Mass Evaluation feature that lets instructors evaluate multiple participants in one action. A new Dichotomous (Yes/No) question type also supports feedback and evaluation, alongside filtering enhancements to the Training Calendar and quiz-review improvements.
Policy and Regional Compliance
The new Work From Home policy type extends SunFish beyond the existing Work From Anywhere policy. Organisations can configure WFH by Number of Days, using weekly or monthly quotas, or Specific Days, such as allowing WFH every Friday. Attendance validation checks the employee’s location against the configured radius before applying the quota or specific-day rule.
For Malaysia specifically, this release adds support for the SKBBK contribution, including payroll component and payslip reporting. It also adds Multiple Zakat Center Allocation across defined periods, and Fixed and Additional Tax Configuration for greater payroll flexibility. Other localisation updates include Singapore’s repeated childcare-leave calculation and improved leave-entitlement handling when employees transfer between companies.
Why Choose SunFish HR by DataOn
The SunFish HR Q2 2026 release reflects the same direction DataOn has followed since 1999. Build HR technology that solves real, everyday complexity rather than adding features for their own sake. SunFish HR by DataOn brings payroll, workforce scheduling, reporting, and compliance into one platform, with regional updates that keep Malaysian businesses statutory-ready as regulations evolve.
For Malaysian companies exploring how these updates apply to their setup, SunFish HR’s Enterprise Payroll, Time Management, and AI & Analytics modules reflect exactly the kind of practical, everyday improvements covered in this release.
Media Contact Akmal Razman, Marketing Executive at SunFish HR Malaysia by Dataon.com | sunfish.malaysia@dataon.com
