How it works
The employee record is the single source for everything HR and payroll need: personal and contact details, the contract and its documents, the reporting line, grade, cost centre and branch, the salary structure, bank details, and the history of every change. Onboarding and exit are checklists with owners, so laptops, access cards, system accounts and final settlements are not forgotten.
Attendance can come from biometric or card devices, from a file, from the employee self-service portal or from a manual register. Shift types define working hours, grace periods and overtime rules. Leave is governed by policies: types, annual allocation, carry-forward, accrual and who approves. An employee applies on the portal, the manager approves, and the balance and the payroll are updated without an email or a spreadsheet.
Payroll is a structure of components rather than a list of numbers. Earnings and deductions are defined once with their formulas, assigned to employees through salary structures, and computed for each pay period. Statutory deductions are configured per country and applied automatically. Loans, salary advances, arrears, overtime and unpaid leave feed in from their own records. The payroll run produces payslips, the bank payment file and the journal entry for the ledger, and nothing is paid that has not been approved.
The employee self-service portal gives staff their payslips, leave balances, attendance, expense claims and personal details, and gives managers their approvals, on a phone or a desktop. Appraisals, training records, grievances and disciplinary records are kept against the employee, with access restricted to the people who should see them. Reports cover headcount, turnover, leave liability, payroll cost by department and statutory returns.