Custom payroll policies
A custom payroll policy turns an attendance pattern into money — a punctuality bonus, a tardiness deduction, a seniority allowance, a distance-based payment. They are how company-specific pay rules get applied consistently instead of being calculated by hand each cycle.
Where: Settings › Payroll › Custom policies You need: the payroll settings right
What a policy does
Every policy answers one question: is the employee being rewarded or penalised, and on what evidence? The evidence comes from attendance — hours worked, lateness, absence, shifts, distance, custom fields — and the policy turns it into a line on the payslip.
There are more than twenty policy types. They fall into a few families:
| Family | Examples |
|---|---|
| Attendance-based bonuses | Attendance bonus, daily bonus, event bonus, paid activity bonus |
| Penalties | Tardy penalty, absence penalty |
| Fixed payments with deductions | Fixed payment with tardiness deduction, fixed payment with absence deduction |
| Monthly working | Monthly working, and a variant deducting tardiness by the minute |
| Seniority | Seniority allowance — flat, based on wage, or on monthly wage |
| Overtime and shift | Overtime bonus, overtime bonus (fixed), additional night differential |
| Distance-based | Distance allowance, and a checkpoint-based variant |
| Custom-field driven | Hourly bonus and shift bonus based on a custom field |
| Holiday | Holiday payment, and DOLE holiday (Philippines only) |
💡 Some type names are very close to one another — there are two variants of "fixed payment with tardiness deduction", and three kinds of seniority allowance. Read what a type does rather than choosing by name, and check the first payslip it produces.
Which one, when
| You want | Consider |
|---|---|
| To reward perfect attendance | Attendance bonus |
| To deduct for lateness | Tardy penalty, or a minutely variant for precision |
| To pay a fixed amount that shrinks with lateness | Fixed payment with tardiness deduction |
| To pay more for long service | A seniority allowance — pick the basis deliberately |
| To pay by distance travelled | Distance allowance, or the checkpoint variant |
How to set up a policy
- Open Settings › Payroll › Custom policies.
- Create the policy and choose the type — this decides everything about how it behaves.
- Configure its values: thresholds, amounts, rates.
- Decide who it applies to.
- Recalculate a payslip and read the result before letting it run across everyone.
What Happens Next
- The policy is applied when payslips are calculated, and appears as an other payment on the payslip.
- Changing a policy does not alter payslips already calculated — recalculate them if it should apply.
- Because policies read attendance, an amendment approved after calculation changes the outcome only on recalculation.
Tips
- Test on one employee, on a real period, before applying it broadly. A policy that misreads a threshold applies that error to everyone at once.
- Check a boundary case. Someone exactly at the threshold, and someone one minute either side. Thresholds are where policies are wrong.
- Write down what each policy is for. A year later, a policy named "Bonus 2" with a threshold of 3 is unmaintainable.
- Prefer fewer, clearer policies. Several overlapping ones interact in ways nobody predicts, and the payslip becomes impossible to explain to the employee.
- Review policies when attendance rules change. They read attendance, so a change to shifts or activities can change what they pay without anyone touching the policy.
Troubleshooting / FAQ
Q: The policy is not producing anything. Check the payslip has been recalculated since the policy was created, that the employee is in scope, and that the attendance actually meets the threshold.
Q: Two policies are both paying for the same thing. They can overlap — nothing prevents it. Decide which one you want and remove the other.
Q: The amount is right for most people and wrong for a few. Look at the exceptions' attendance rather than the policy. Part-time schedules and unusual shift patterns are the usual cause.
Q: Which of the two similar fixed-payment types should I use? Read the behaviour of each and test both on one payslip. The names do not distinguish them.