Pay
Loans guide
Loans lets you lend money to staff and recover it automatically through payroll. This guide covers what a loan is, the steps it goes through, how repayments come off pay, how the outstanding balance is worked out, and the day-to-day portfolio view.
This is the guide HumanR users read inside the product, published as-is. It is written for someone with the screen in front of them, so it describes buttons you cannot click from here — which is rather the point: you can check how the product behaves before you commit to it.
What loans are
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, step by step
A loan moves through a clear sequence:
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Requested | Raised, awaiting approval. |
| Approved | Signed off, ready to pay out. |
| Disbursed | The money has been handed over. |
| Recovering | Repayments are coming off payroll. |
| Settled | Fully repaid — nothing left owing. |
A loan can also be Suspended (recovery paused), Written off (the balance forgiven) or Cancelled (before it ran).
How repayment reaches payroll
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.
Balance & statement
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 portfolio & advances
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.
Permissions & gotchas
- 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.