Staff credit schemes guide

A loan records money advanced to an employee and how it's paid back. By default a loan is:

• Interest-free — the total to repay equals the amount borrowed. You can set it up differently, but interest-free is the starting point.
• Internal — lent by the company itself, with no outside lender.

Each loan has a monthly amount — how much to recover from pay each month — and a running balance that falls as it's repaid.

A loan moves through a clear sequence:

A loan can also be Suspended (recovery paused), Written off (the balance forgiven) or Cancelled (before it ran).

Once a loan is recovering, each payroll run automatically deducts an installment:

• It takes the monthly amount, but never more than the remaining balance.
• The last installment is trimmed to whatever is left, so the loan lands exactly on zero — never over-recovers.
• By default recovery pauses automatically in a month where the person's pay is on hold or they're on unpaid leave, so you don't chase money that isn't there. (This can be turned off per loan.)

Because it's automatic, you don't enter loan deductions on the payroll run by hand — the run picks them up.

A loan's outstanding balance is worked out on the fly — from the repayments made through finalized payroll runs plus any manual repayments — rather than stored as a number that could drift out of step.

• Record a manual repayment when someone pays outside payroll (cash, transfer).
• Settle early to clear the remaining balance in one go.
• The statement lists every installment and repayment so the balance is always explainable.

The main loans screen is your portfolio. Tabs group loans by stage, you can search by person or reference, and totals show how much is outstanding by currency.

Salary advances are the simpler sibling — a small amount recovered from the next pay run or two — and have their own list alongside loans. Staff can request either from self-service; see the Employee Self-Service guide.

A credit purchase is goods or services a group company sells to a member of staff, recovered from their salary. Each agreement is one record with its own balance: several sales orders can sit inside it (number, date, items, amount), and the outstanding figure is always for the agreement as a whole, never pooled across agreements.

• The selling company is chosen from the group's company register.
• References run in their own series (CP-2026-001), separate from loans.
• Approval, disbursement, pausing, write-off and early settlement work exactly as for a loan; the payslip shows the recovery as CREDIT PURCHASE.
• Interest is flat on the financed amount: total = amount × (1 + rate% × tenure ÷ 12), spread evenly over the tenure. Leave the rate blank for an interest-free agreement.

Each scheme has an outstanding as at report: pick a date and see every record that had been disbursed by then, with the repayments taken up to that date and what was still owed. The columns follow the usual staff-credit workbook, and Excel and CSV downloads carry the same rows, with a filter on the header row.

• Repayments count from finalized payroll runs whose period had ended by the date, plus manual repayments dated by then. Draft runs never count.
• Nothing is typed in: finalizing a run moves the reports by itself. A run reopened after the date drops out until it is finalized again.
• Filter by staff, employment company, currency and status — Active outstanding, Fully settled or all.
• Instalments in arrears compares the instalments due by the date with what has been recovered — a paused or skipped month shows up here.

Every loan, advance and credit purchase can carry its documents: the signed agreement, a guarantee agreement, and anything supporting. PDF, Word, Excel and images up to 10 MB each, twenty per record. Macro-enabled Office files are refused.

Keep the signed agreement on file: a deduction from wages for a loan, an advance or goods sold needs the employee's written permission.

When a payroll run is generated, each payslip's staff-credit recoveries — loans, external loans, advances and credit purchases together — are compared with a share of that month's gross pay (one third unless changed under Reference data ▸ Statutory settings). Payslips over the cap are listed as a warning when the run is generated and again before it is finalized.

It is a warning, never a block: the run still finalizes. Reduce the instalment, pause the recovery or record the employee's agreement to the larger amount.

• Payroll · View — see loans and balances.
• Payroll · Manage — create, approve-side actions, record repayments and settle.

Worth remembering

• Loans default to interest-free and company-lent; change that at setup if you need to.
• Recovery is automatic through payroll and never exceeds the balance.
• The balance is calculated, never a stored figure — so it can't fall out of sync.
• You can only delete a draft or a loan that hasn't started recovering; cancelling one also withdraws its open approval.