2025 Engineering Recap

Summary: 

Major New Features

• Vendor Management Functionality
• Dynamic Contract Data Fields
• Insights Dashboard
• Real-Time Quote System

New Features

• Zapier App
• Webhooks
• Project Cost Codes
• MFA
  

Feature Updates

• Roles & Permissions
• Identity Verification
• Onboarding Flexibility

Feature Request List

Summary 

2025 was a foundational year for TalentDesk.

Our focus was on expanding the platform beyond individual freelancers and projects, and towards supporting more complex, real-world operating models including vendor-led delivery, richer contract customisation, deeper operational insight, and more sophisticated global payments.

Alongside a steady stream of customer-requested enhancements, we delivered several major features that significantly extend what TalentDesk can support today. This post recaps the most important developments shipped in 2025 and sets the context for what’s coming next.

Major New Features

Vendor Management Functionality

One of the biggest launches of 2025 was Vendor Management - a feature designed to support organisations that work with agencies, consultancies, and vendor-led teams, not just individual freelancers.

Clients can now:

• Invite vendors directly into their TalentDesk account
  
  
• Allow vendors to invite and manage their own team members
  
  
• Assign vendor team members to projects and tasks like any other provider

From a financial perspective, the platform automatically generates consolidated vendor invoices, linking them back to the underlying project and task work completed by each team member.

This feature unlocks entirely new delivery models for clients, while preserving the same compliance, budget control, and approval workflows that TalentDesk is built around.

Dynamic Contract Data Fields

Contracts are rarely “one size fits all”, especially at scale.

In 2025, we introduced Dynamic Contract Data Fields, giving clients far more flexibility when working with contract templates. Clients can now:

• Add unlimited custom data fields to uploaded contract templates
  
  
• Populate those fields at the point of sending a contract for signature
  
  
• Customise contracts per freelancer, role, rate, jurisdiction, or engagement

This allows teams to maintain a single contract template while still tailoring each agreement precisely to the recipient - reducing admin overhead and the risk of manual errors.

Insights Dashboard

To give clients better visibility into how their freelance workforce operates, we launched the Insights Dashboard.

This new chart-based view provides date-range driven statistics across key operational metrics, including:

• Freelancer activity and engagement
  
  
• Project and task utilisation
  
  
• Platform usage trends

The Insights Dashboard offers a quick, visual way for managers and finance teams to understand what’s happening across their organisation without exporting data or building custom reports.

Real-Time Quote System

Payments remain a critical part of the TalentDesk platform, and in 2025, we expanded our global payment capabilities further.

We introduced:

• Full API integration with all payment partners
  
  
• A real-time payout quote system for freelancer invoices

The quote system ensures that freelancers are paid as optimally as possible, taking into account payment routes, fees, and currency considerations at the moment of payout. This improves transparency for freelancers and helps ensure fast, reliable payments at scale, and paves the way for full automation.

New Features

Zapier App

While TalentDesk has offered a comprehensive Open API for clients to create their own integrations with, including via services like Zapier.

This year, we took the step to develop the TalentDesk Zapier App. Zapier users can now use the full automation power of Zapier with our pre-configured Events and Actions to streamline their operations.

Webhooks

To further enhance the integration experience for clients who wish to connect TalentDesk to their other systems, we developed a Webhook framework with an initial selection of the most requested webhooks available.

This framework allows us to quickly add new webhooks on request.

Project Cost Codes

One of the most requested improvements we have received is the ability to better track project spend aligned with internal accounting.

A lot of our clients run what we call “project-based accounting”, where their accounting team define a new expense Cost Code for the clients they work with or the projects they work on.

With this new feature, TalentDesk admins can upload or create their list of accounting cost codes and assign them to projects within the system.

This data can then be exported in Bill formats for Xero and QuickBooks, or made available via bespoke custom reports.

MFA

Security is extremely important to us at TalentDesk. Our clients, and their contingent workforce, entrust us with their sensitive personal data. It is our responsibility to ensure that no unauthorised access to this data is possible.

This is why we introduced free Multi-Factor Authentication, with the option for clients to make this mandatory for all users. Giving our users greater peace of mind that their data is safe.

Feature Updates

Roles & Permissions

In 2024, we deployed our new Roles & Permissions feature, which allows our clients to control feature access for their manager users. 

This year, we continued adding feature permissions to extend that control even further.

Identity Verification

Identity verification has been a core part of provider onboarding for a long time; however, the user experience has not always been the best for providers.

This year, we decided to change the service provider partner we work with for identity checks to Veriff, whose verification process is much more modern and fluid.

Onboarding Flexibility

No one is perfect, and mistakes can be made during the onboarding of new freelancers. This is why we have added greater flexibility to the onboarding process.

Attached the wrong contract or forget to add one that is required? You can now add, change and remove contracts to a user’s onboarding at any time.

The same applies to onboarding forms: add, change, or remove them as needed.

Feature Request List

While we have a stacked development roadmap each year, we believe that it is important to continually listen to clients for changes that will quickly improve their daily interaction with the TalentDesk platform. We review client feature requests bi-weekly and try to incorporate them into our development where possible. Below is a selection of some of the client feature requests that we delivered in 2025:

• Allow managers to invite providers to tasks without being the task owner
• API endpoints to access Time Tracker data
• Make the Notification template sent when a Provider's invoice is marked as paid in Direct-mode organisations
• Add support for my Ghanaian bank accounts
• Add a webhook to notify when an opportunity application is accepted
• Inform Providers when and why their worksheet isn't editable
• Add direct links to the various IRS docs for Providers
• Add a "select all" option when applying a new default rate to all of my providers' tasks
• Link to the related Service Order each entry for each entry on the Provider Payment Status widget
• Record whether a time tracker time recording was tracked or added manually
• Add a webhook to announce new or updated user records
• Add a setting to disable the social media profiles page for all users
• Add the ability to export all invitees
• Add API endpoints to manage a task's managers
• Add the ability to be able to assign multiple managers to bulk-imported tasks
• Add the ability to clone the assigned managers when cloning a task
• Add the ability to automatically add a provider to all tasks when adding them to a project
• Add a new organisation setting to make the use of a task template mandatory
• Improve the ability to quickly remove providers from a project
• Add support for bulk importing of Opportunities
• Display the full title of projects with long titles
• Add endpoints to manage opportunities via the API
• Add the ability to attach multiple files to Proforma Invoices
• Add the ability to add a Provider to a task rather than invite them
• Remove the Task progress bar
• When adjusting the default rate for a provider, add the option to apply this to any active tasks that the provider has
• Update the manager list view design in tasks to match the Provider list
• Add the ability to assign Providers to Projects and/or Tasks via Bulk imports
• Add support for multiple line items on expense claims
• Add a permission to control who can suggest a rate when inviting a provider to a task
• Add support for the required uploading of a W-9 document during onboarding
• Add a setting to control whether manually raised Service Orders should be automatically approved
• Add support to the Time Tracker to support past billing periods
• Add bulk import of Managers & Providers
• Add a setting to control whether the tracker creates a grouped worksheet or individual worksheets
• Add the ability to cancel/void/reject a worksheet that has tracked time, and have the times revert to an uninvoiced state
• Add a view for Providers to see a history of their tracked time
• Add functionality for Providers to be able to easily create Worksheets for their tracked time
• Improve visibility of an active time tracker for Providers