Getting started with Payroll

Payroll turns a period of attendance into payslips, statutory deductions and a payment file. This page is the map: what the pieces are, the order they happen in, and where to go next.

Where: Payroll You need: payroll rights — see Payroll user rights

The shape of a payroll run

batch cycle  →  payroll run  →  payslips  →  calculate  →  review  →  approve  →  pay

Batch cycle is the recurring definition — who is paid, how often, and for which cut-off. You set it up once. Everything else is an instance of it.

Payroll run is one occurrence of that cycle: a period, with a payslip for every employee in it.

Payslip is one employee's pay for that run. It is calculated from attendance, wage settings, other payments and statutory rules.

The concept the rest depends on is the cut-off: the period whose work is being paid. It is not the same as the pay date, and confusing the two is the most common source of "why is this on the wrong payslip".

How often payroll runs

The batch cycle's type decides both the period and how much of a monthly salary lands in each payslip:

Weekly and bi-weekly do not divide evenly into a month, which is why their divisors are not round: a year has 52.14 weeks, not 52.

The order to learn it in

Start here — how pay is derived

• How wages are calculated — the rates every other figure comes from
• Daily-paid, monthly-paid and hourly-paid employees

Running payroll

• Running a payroll batch cycle — the end-to-end process
• Viewing and validating payslips
• Payment and disbursement

Adjustments and extra pay

• Other payments: allowances, bonuses and deductions
• 13th month pay
• Final pay on termination

Reports and settings are covered in their own sections, and settings are worth reading only once you have seen a run.

What Happens Next

• Payslips exist as soon as a run is created, but hold no figures until they are calculated.
• Calculation reads attendance, wage settings and statutory tables as they are at that moment, and stores the result. Later setting changes do not reach back into a calculated payslip.
• Once a run is paid, its figures feed the statutory and year-end reports for that period.

Tips

• Do a parallel run before going live. Run one real period in KAMI alongside your existing process and compare payslip by payslip. Everything that is misconfigured shows up here, where it costs nothing.
• Get the wage basis right before anything else. It decides every derived rate; see How wages are calculated.
• Close attendance before you calculate. Calculation reads attendance as it stands, so amendments approved afterwards are not in the payslip until you recalculate.
• Keep one person accountable for approving runs. The approval step is the control; if everyone can approve, nobody is checking.

Related articles

• How wages are calculated
• Running a payroll batch cycle
• Batch cycles
• Payroll user rights