Payroll workflow

Payroll is organised into runs. A run is one pay cycle — normally a month, or a one-off Ramadan run — and it holds one line per employee per salary package. Each line is a small ledger: a basic figure plus a list of items, where every item is either an addition (something the employee earns) or a deduction (something taken off).

The pay period is not the calendar month. A month labelled “June” runs from the 25th of May to the 24th of June. Attendance and leave are lined up to the same window, so a day counted for attendance is a day paid in the run that covers it.

A line's totals are always Gross = Basic + additions, Deductions = sum of deductions, and Net = Gross − Deductions. You never type the net; it is recomputed the instant anything on the line changes.

1. Create the run. Pick a year, month and kind (Monthly or Ramadan). The moment it is created the system generates every line — one per active salary package — and fills in earnings, attendance-driven deductions, pension, loan and advance instalments automatically.
2. Review & adjust (Draft). While a run is Draft you can edit any line: change the basic, correct absent or leave days, add a one-off bonus or deduction, add an employee the generator missed, or remove a line. Every edit re-totals that line at once.
3. Regenerate if the source data changed. If salary packages, attendance or deductions changed after you created the run, Regenerate rebuilds the lines from scratch. This is deliberate and destructive: it discards manual line edits, so regenerate before you hand-adjust, not after.
4. Finalize. Finalizing sets the run to Finalized, stamps who finalized it and when, and locks it — lines and items can no longer be edited. Finalizing is also what makes the run's loan and advance recoveries count toward those balances.
5. Reopen only if you must. A finalized run can be reopened back to Draft (which clears the finalize stamps and refreshes loan statuses). Because balances are computed only from finalized runs, reopening cleanly un-counts what the run had recovered — nothing is double-charged.

The Payroll summary reconciles a run into a per-bank, per-currency withdrawal sheet once you are happy with it.

Most earnings come straight from the employee's salary package — the basic and its fixed allowances. The rest are worked out per run from attendance and the calendar:

A pay rise is not entered on the run. It is an increment applied to the package, which raises the basic from the next run onward.

Some deductions are worked out by the system from attendance and standing records; others are recurring amounts you set up once and let run. All of them are taken in the package's own currency.

Loan and advance balances are never stored — they are recomputed from what finalized runs have actually recovered, plus any manual repayments. That is why a recovery only counts once the run is finalized.

The short version: the system does the arithmetic; people set the inputs. You do not type gross, net, pension, overtime or a loan instalment — those are derived. What a person controls is the underlying record.

So if a figure looks wrong, you fix its source — the package, the attendance day, the deduction record — and regenerate, rather than overtyping the total.

Payroll sits behind two permissions, and money is behind a third:

Out of the box, Admin and HR hold all three; a plain Viewer has no payroll access at all. Roles are configurable, so an account can be given, say, Payroll · View and Sensitive · Pay without Manage — a read-only payroll auditor who can see the figures but change nothing.

These checks run on the server, so a hidden column can't be revealed by editing the page, and a blocked action can't be forced through a link. The exact role → permission map is on the Roles & permissions page.

An employee can be paid through more than one package, and each package has its own currency and bank details. The classic case is a split: part of the salary paid in USD to a foreign account and the rest as an MVR local allowance. Each package becomes its own line in the run, in its own currency.

When someone has several packages, one is the main package (the one with the largest basic). A few things attach only to it:

• Pension is charged once, on the main package.
• Overtime and the Friday allowance are added to the main package.
• An increment raises the main package's basic.

A deduction is routed to the package that matches its currency — a USD loan comes off the USD package — falling back to the main package when there is no currency match. This keeps every recovery in the right currency.

A hold withholds an employee's pay without cancelling it. While a hold covers a run's period, that person's line is still fully calculated but flagged on hold: it is earned, and it shows on the run, but it is kept off the bank-transfer list at the bottom of the summary.

• Release a hold and the withheld pay is paid out in the next monthly run, gathered into one “held salary released” line covering all the months it spanned.
• Cancel a hold and the flag is simply dropped from the affected lines; past payslips are not rewritten.

A loan set to pause on hold or leave skips its instalment in any month the line is held or the employee is on unpaid leave, so a held month doesn't quietly eat into a loan balance. Holds are managed on the Holds screen; the reason for a hold is itself sensitive and hidden from users without the personal-data permission.

Everything a run reads from is maintained on its own screen:

• Salary packages — the basic and allowances behind every line; edit a package, add a second one, or change bank details here.
• Increments — request and apply pay rises; applying one lifts the main package's basic from the next run.
• Deductions — standing monthly deductions with a start/end window and an optional total cap that closes them automatically.
• Pension — who is enrolled in the MPRF, with the monthly contribution file to file with the scheme.
• Overtime — the per-site defaults (standard hours, break, OT multiplier, Friday rate) a package can override.
• Channels — the bank/cash payment methods behind each package, and a check that none are unmapped.
• Holds — withhold and later release or cancel an employee's pay.
• Final settlements — end-of-service pay: prorated salary, any encashment and held salary, gratuity, less outstanding loans and advances.
• Loans & advances — the loan book and salary advances the run recovers against.