Salary & Payroll

Everything to do with what people are paid — pay structures, monthly payroll, loans, provident fund, gratuity, tax, increments, and pay reports.

Overview

Salary & Payroll is where a company defines what each role or person costs (Cost to Company), turns that into an actual monthly pay structure, and runs payroll every month based on attendance, leave, loans, and any one-off payments.

It covers the statutory side of pay — provident fund, gratuity, tax deductions, and tax certificates — as well as day-to-day needs like salary advances, emergency loans, leave encashment, and bonus or commission payments.

Pay raises go through a dedicated Increments area with its own eligibility rules, approval chains, and letters. Sensitive actions — approving payroll, approving loans, approving raises — go through configurable approval chains rather than one person acting alone, and every employee can see their own payslips, provident fund, and gratuity records without seeing anyone else's.

Who uses it

HR Admins: Set up pay structures and components, configure tax, provident fund, gratuity and day-basis rules, run and approve monthly payroll, issue payslips, create and manage loans, run reports, and configure approval chains and increment policies.
Managers: May be asked to approve a step in a payroll, loan, variable pay, leave encashment, or increment approval chain if the company's approval settings name their role. They don't manage pay structures themselves unless specifically given that access.
Employees: View their own payslips, cost-to-company breakdown, provident fund and gratuity statements, loan balances, leave encashment history, and increment history. They can request loans and leave encashment, but cannot see anyone else's pay figures unless specifically permitted.

What you can do here

Setting up pay structures

Define the company's Cost to Company (CTC) envelope: cash paid to the employee, non-cash benefits the company buys for them, and statutory employer costs that never reach the employee as pay.
Set up flexible benefits employees can elect within limits (a minimum, a maximum, or a percentage cap of total pay).
Build the catalog of pay components (earnings and deductions), marking each as a fixed amount or a percentage.
Assign each active employee their actual monthly pay structure — basic salary plus chosen allowances and deductions — with an effective date, so pay changes are tracked over time rather than overwritten.
Configure the “Day Basis” — the divisor used to turn a monthly salary into a daily rate (a fixed number of days, actual calendar days, actual working days excluding holidays, or a custom number for an exceptional month).

Running payroll

Generate a draft payroll run for a chosen month, automatically pulling in attendance, leave, late arrivals, loan installments, provident fund, gratuity accrual, and any approved bonuses or leave payouts.
Review and, if needed, recalculate individual employee lines before approving — especially when someone's salary changed after the draft was generated.
Send the run through an approval chain (single step or multiple named steps), then mark it as paid once approved.
Release an off-cycle “Advance” payroll for a future or exceptional payment outside the regular monthly cycle.
Generate and distribute payslips once a run is approved and paid, viewable by each employee and downloadable.

Loans and advances

Define loan types (salary advance, emergency loan, general loan) with rules: maximum amount, minimum/maximum repayment installments, minimum months of service, a cooldown before another loan of the same type, and a cap on how much of someone's take-home pay all their loans together may consume.
Issue a loan with eligibility automatically checked against those rules.
Loans are deducted from payroll each month as an installment automatically; once a loan is paid, repaid manually, or already included in a payroll run, only its closing, remaining installment, or notes can still change.
Close a loan as written off, settled outside payroll, or cancelled — a record is kept rather than deleted.
When an employee leaves, outstanding loans marked to settle on exit are automatically recovered from the final settlement.

Statutory items

Provident fund: configure whether it's enabled, the contribution basis (contractual basic, actual pay, or take-home pay), employee/employer contribution rates, and any wage ceiling or floor. Individuals can have their own enrollment and rates overriding the company default.
Gratuity: configure the severance formula — days of pay per year of service, wage basis, minimum qualifying years of service, and partial-year rounding. Accrues monthly and pays out on eligible exits, with the minimum-service requirement waived for death or permanent disablement.
Tax: configure income tax slabs; tax is calculated progressively and deducted every month. Generate year-end tax certificates, an employer tax return summary, and monthly statutory remittance summaries (tax and provident fund) for filing.
Leave encashment: configure, per leave type, whether unused leave converts to cash — mid-service, at year-end, or on exit — with yearly limits, a minimum balance to keep, and whether the payout is taxable.

Increments

Create an individual pay increase for an employee — a flat amount, a percentage, or a brand-new value — the system blocks any change that would lower someone's pay.
Set up increment policies that run automatically on a schedule (annual, bi-annual, quarterly, or custom), based on fixed calendar dates or work anniversaries, with eligibility rules like minimum tenure, completed probation, and no other recent raise.
Review and adjust a generated batch of proposed raises in one worksheet, including bulk import from a spreadsheet-style file.
Route every increment through an approval chain that can vary by amount, percentage increase, department, or employment type; nobody can approve their own raise.
Generate and send formal increment letters, optionally routed through electronic signature.
Every employee can view their own increment and salary history; HR can view anyone's.

Reports

Monthly summary, department summary, and per-employee payroll reports.
A dedicated loans report showing balances and recoveries.
Cost-to-company, salary distribution, pay variance month-to-month, and a payroll cost forecast.
Every report can be downloaded, and payroll figures link back to the specific payroll run they came from.

Step-by-step: Running a monthly payroll cycle

1Make sure prerequisites are in place: shifts are defined for employees, a Day Basis is selected, and everyone who should be paid has a salary structure set up.
2From Payroll, choose Generate Payroll for the month you want to run.
3The system creates a draft with one line per active employee, factoring in attendance, leave, late arrivals, tax, loan installments, provident fund, gratuity accrual, and any approved bonuses, commissions, or leave payouts.
4Review the draft. If anyone's salary changed after the draft was generated, recalculate their flagged line before moving on.
5Submit the run for approval — depending on configuration, it may need one sign-off or several.
6Once approved, mark the run as Paid. This finalizes the numbers and makes payslips available.
7Employees can now view and download their payslips; totals also feed into reports, tax certificates, and statutory remittance summaries for that month.

How it connects to other modules

Attendance and Leave Management feed payroll directly: present days, approved paid leave, unpaid leave, absences, and late arrivals all shape each employee's pay for the month.
Employee Lifecycle: when someone is offboarded, their final settlement automatically pulls in gratuity payout, leave encashment, and any outstanding loans to be recovered.
Settings & Administration > Roles & Permissions controls what someone can see or do here — including whether they can see salary amounts at all — so a company can build a narrow “Payroll Officer” role without full HR access.
Organization settings (weekend pattern, time zone) affect working-day counts and per-day pay calculations.
Increment letters can be routed through the same electronic signature capability used in Documents & e-Signatures.

Good to know

Nobody can see another employee's salary figures unless they specifically hold that right — a separate permission from general employee management.
Sensitive actions use configurable multi-step approval chains (payroll, variable pay, leave encashment, loans, and exit settlements each have their own); the organization's owner can always act on a stuck step so payroll never gets permanently blocked.
A pay raise can never lower an employee's salary, and nobody can approve their own pay raise, bonus, or leave encashment.
A loan's basic terms lock once payroll has deducted from it or a manual repayment has been recorded; from then on it can still be closed or have its remaining installment adjusted, but not deleted.
If someone's pay and leave for a month would deduct more than they earned, the shortfall carries forward to a future month rather than putting them into negative pay.
Provident fund can be based on contractual basic pay, actual pay, or take-home pay — each behaves differently for a month with unpaid leave.
Gratuity is always calculated on the full, current wage — not a part-month wage — even for someone leaving partway through their final month.
A payroll month, once it exists in any status, cannot have a second regular payroll generated for it — it must be edited, reverted, or handled as an Advance instead.