One island, 320 staff: from punch to payslip to posted journal
A five-star island resort with its own staff village
A representative walk-through of a resort month end: attendance closes, the service charge pool is split, payroll runs once, staff read their own payslips on their phones, and the whole thing leaves as a balanced journal for finance. The resort is illustrative — the workflow, and every capability behind it, is real.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a named customer. The company is a composite; every capability described is real and available in HumanR today.
1 run
covers pay, overtime, service charge and deductions
0 printed
payslips — staff read their own on their phones
Balanced
journal per currency, or nothing leaves the system
The challenge
Where it started
Around 320 staff on one island — roughly two thirds expatriate, housed in a staff village, paid across MVR and USD, and every one of them entitled to a share of the month's service charge. Guest operations run on a PMS, the books run on an accounting system, and the people run on four spreadsheets and the HR manager's memory.
The service charge split rebuilt in a workbook every month, and questioned by staff every month
Payslips printed, cut and handed out — then reprinted for everyone who lost theirs
Salary advance requests arriving by WhatsApp, approved verbally, remembered inconsistently
Attendance exported from three terminals and reconciled by hand against the duty roster
Payroll totals retyped into the accounting system, where they didn't always balance first time
What we did
The move onto HumanR
- 1
Let the terminals close the month
Biometric terminals across the back of house stream punches straight in. Late-grace, overtime and Friday allowance rules are set per site, so the attendance month closes as a calculation rather than a reconciliation.
Biometric Attendance & Overtime → - 2
Pool the service charge, then split it by rule
The month's collection is entered once as a pool. The retention percentage is set for the property and snapshotted onto that month, eligibility and basis are applied per site, and each person's share is computed from the rules — not from a formula somebody dragged down a column.
Service Charge Distribution → - 3
Run payroll once, service charge included
MVR and USD packages, overtime, the service charge share, loans, advances and any held salary all settle inside one run. Reopening it recomputes rather than drifts, so a late correction doesn't cost the whole month.
Dual-Currency Payroll → - 4
Hand staff their own payslips
Instead of a print run, staff open the portal on their phones: this month's payslip and the ones before it, their leave balance, and a form for the salary advance they used to ask for in the corridor — routed into the same approval queue HR already works.
Employee Self-Service → - 5
Route the money requests through one engine
Advances, loans and leave requests arrive as records with an approver, an amount band and a decision date attached. The question 'who approved this?' has an answer that doesn't depend on anyone's recollection.
Approvals & Workflows → - 6
Post the month to the ledger, balanced
The finalized run maps to the property's own chart of accounts and leaves as a journal in the format the accounting system reads — or posts to QuickBooks Online directly. It won't export unbalanced, so the file that reaches finance is a file that will go in.
Finance & GL Export →
The result
What changed
A service charge split computed from stated rules, with a per-person share anyone can be shown
Payslips available to every staff member the moment the run is finalized
Advance and loan requests raised by staff themselves, with the approval recorded
Attendance closed from the terminals instead of reconciled against a roster by hand
Month-end payroll reaching finance as a journal, in the accounting system's own format
“The service charge question isn't really about arithmetic — it's about whether you can show someone how their number was reached. Once the rules live in the system and the payslip is in their pocket, the question mostly stops being asked.”
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