Calamari What's New

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

We've been working on this for a few months - and it's now rolling out. Calamari is getting an MCP integration, which means you'll be able to connect ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or whichever AI assistant you already use, directly to Calamari.

Instead of opening the app, just tell your assistant: "Clock in", "Submit a leave request for May 19th", or "Who's off next week?" The AI connects to Calamari and takes care of it.

In the first version, you'll be able to:

• clock in and clock out
• submit a leave request — with a substitute, reason, and comment
• search for employees
• check upcoming absences in your team

👉 Learn more about Calamari AI

The employee profile now has a search bar. Type a field name or group name and results filter in real time. No scrolling, no remembering which section a field lives in.

What you get:

• No need to remember which tab a field is in
• Search by field name or the section it belongs to - works either way
• Works in view mode - no need to switch to edit first

👉 Open any employee profile and start typing in the search box

Benefit applications, data changes, equipment, training, remote work requests – in most companies, they bounce between email, Slack, paper forms, and spreadsheets. HR wastes time answering the same questions, and requests get lost or stuck without a status.

We're building a new feature to bring order to this – Employee Requests – available in the People module, at no extra cost. Here's what's coming in the first release:

Request catalog with policy descriptions: employees open Calamari and see what they can request, what the rules are, and what they need to attach.

Flexible form builder: create any request type with text fields, dates, dropdowns, and attachments. Target each request to the right group of employees using filters.

Automatic numbering: sequential, with a customizable format (e.g., 01-2026-MULTISPORT).

Type-based approval and fulfillment: a benefit request goes to HR, an office key request goes to the Office Manager. After approval, the executor gets notified that there's work to do.

But before we ship it – we need your input.

How does your company handle employee requests today? What tools do you use, what frustrates you, what matters most to you? The survey takes about 3 minutes and will directly shape what goes into the first release.

👉 Take a quick survey

Read more about Employee Requests here

You have full control over who sees the responses and whether they are signed. When configuring a review session, you can set visibility separately for those managing the process (manager, administrator) and for the person being reviewed.

You have three modes to choose from: response with the reviewer's name and surname, anonymous response or no access to responses.

What's more, you can enable an option where the reviewer themselves decides whether they want to respond openly or anonymously.

This is a solution for companies that want open feedback but don't want to force it on people who don't yet feel comfortable with it.

You can also override visibility at the level of an individual question – for example, most questions can be open, but a question about cooperation with the manager can be anonymous.

👉 Set up answer visibility in your review session settings

Read more about Anonymous Reviews