Calamari What's New

This is our biggest news this month. Glasses reimbursement, a laptop request, a bank account change, an employment certificate: you can now handle all of these inside Calamari instead of digging through emails or your company chat.

You build your own request catalog for your organization. Define the forms, decide who has access to them, decide who handles them. Every request keeps its own status, history and comments, so nothing gets lost along the way.

How it works:

• Admin builds the forms, chooses which employee groups have access, and assigns who handles them (Configuration → Requests).
• Employee picks a request from the catalog, fills in the form, and tracks its status and comments (Requests → Catalog / My).
• Handler sees how many requests are waiting, can filter them, and close them one at a time, in a group, or all at once, and can undo it if needed.

Notifications about new requests go out by email, Slack or MS Teams, to both sides. This is just the first version, and we're building more improvements based on your feedback.

Feature available for Core HR module users.

👉 Learn more about Employee Requests

Through MCP, you can already log time and submit leave requests in Calamari. Now your AI assistant does a lot more: fills in a whole week's timesheet, assigns time to a project, checks how many days you have left in a given leave allowance.

Ask it to fill in your hours for the whole week in one prompt, just like you'd do it in the browser. It confirms right away which hours it saved. You can assign that time to specific projects, or just ask how many days you have left this year in an allowance, annual leave, or on-demand leave.

Turning on the integration is simpler now too. The terminal starts automatically, and the configuration screen links to step-by-step instructions.

👉 Try it out by turning on the integration in Configuration → Integrations → AI Integration

We're finishing work on a new Goals tab in the Performance module. It's the missing piece: after a review conversation, you set goals, then track progress until the next review.

Here's how it'll work in the first version:

• A goal gets a name, an owner and a due date. Save it as a draft or activate it right away.
• Update the completion percentage as you go, add a comment, flag one that's at risk so you can step in before it's too late.
• Close it out as achieved, partially achieved, not achieved, or cancelled.
• Every change is logged, who changed what and when, which matters once goals are used in reviews and raises.

Visibility depends on the role: employees see their own goals, managers see their team's, admins see everything.

We'll let you know as soon as it's ready. Goals will be part of the Performance module, which is already live today.

👉 Learn more about goals

Smart Tables now feel even more like a spreadsheet. In bulk-edit mode, grab a value in a column and drag it up or down, and Calamari copies it to the other rows, exactly the way you'd do it in Excel.

Where it helps:

• Set the same contract type for a group of people hired around the same time.
• Assign one position or team to a dozen employees after a reorg.
• Fill in the same holiday calendar or custom field value for a whole department.

Drag-to-copy works in columns where copying actually makes sense: position, teams, contract type, holiday calendars, lists and custom fields. First name, last name, email stay untouched, on purpose.

👉 Turn on bulk edit in the People view and give drag-to-fill a try

Do you work with contractors, freelancers, or external partners? You can now include their perspective in the performance review process – without creating a Calamari account for them.

How it works:

• New review type: external review. Add it to your process configuration alongside self-assessment or peer review.
• A unique link for each reviewer. Copy it and send it to your partner via email or any messaging app.
• No login required. The external reviewer opens the link in any browser, fills out the form, and submits their feedback.
• All results in one place. External reviews appear alongside other responses, with export to Excel and PDF.

External review is optional – it doesn't have to be completed to close the process.

👉 Set up external review in Performance Configuration → Review Process -> Feedback or book a Performance module demo

The Calamari mobile app for iOS and Android has been fully refreshed – and remember, your entire team can use our free mobile apps available on Google Play and the App Store.

What's changed:

• New navigation. The most important features are now accessible from tabs at the bottom of the screen, with everything else under "More."
• Refreshed views. We've made account settings, time registration methods, and the notifications screen easier to understand and use.
• Events in a dedicated tab. Events have been moved out of the People view into their own tab, so they're easier to find.
• 4 new languages. Thai, Hindi, Chinese, and Russian — bringing the total to 18 supported languages.

Do your employees move between locations and manually select a project each time? You can now assign a default project to a specific geofencing area on the map.

What this means in practice:

• Automatic project assignment. Based on geofencing, the system detects which location an employee is in and automatically logs their time against the right project.
• Less manual input. Employees don't need to remember to switch projects when they change work locations.
• Admin-side setup. Assign a project to a geofencing location in settings.

👉 Configure in Settings → Time & Attendance → Mobile App & Geofencing

The Calamari MCP integration is now available to all customers – without restrictions. Connect your AI assistant to Calamari and access HR data directly from the tools you use every day.

What you can do via MCP:

• Time tracking: clock in and clock out directly through your AI assistant.
• Leave requests: submit a request, including for part of a day.
• Smart leave planning: ask your AI to suggest an optimal plan that takes public holidays and work schedules into account, so you use as few leave days as possible.
• Team availability: see who on your team has planned absences.
• Colleague information: find out who's on your team, your work schedule, and contract type.
• Timesheet completion: add attendance for a single day or a selected date range – with public holidays and days off automatically excluded. Overlapping shift validation works the same way as in the web app.

Alongside MCP, we've also put together a catalog of ready-to-use AI skills for HR – prompts you can plug into ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other AI tool.

👉 Configure MCP in Settings → Integrations → AI Integration

You can now filter the Timesheet by contract type and immediately narrow the view to a specific group - for example, only full-time employees or only contractors.

It is especially useful when your organization has multiple contract types and you want to review one group's hours without scrolling through the entire list.

👉 Check the new filter in the Time & Attendence module

In performance reviews, the hardest part is usually keeping the process moving. Who's completed their self-assessment, who still needs peer reviewers assigned, whose summary is waiting for you as a manager. We rebuilt the session view so that information is one glance away.

What's changed:

• Progress bars for self-assessment, peer reviews, and summary are now inside the columns they refer to.
• The header and the name column are sticky, and the scrollbar is visible at all times so you always know where you are.
• The table is split into sections. You appear at the top, your direct reports come next, and everyone else sits at the bottom.

Managers find the people they need to act on faster – to assign peer reviewers or complete a summary. Administrators stop hunting through long lists for a specific person.

👉 See the new view in the Performance module → Review sessions