Payroll automation rules
A payroll automation rule sets an employee's payroll fields automatically, based on who they are, instead of someone remembering to configure each new joiner by hand. It is how payroll settings stay consistent across a growing company.
Where: My Team › Settings › Automations › Payroll details You need: the rights to manage team automations
What it automates
Payroll details automation manages the fields that decide how pay is calculated:
| Field | What the rule sets |
|---|---|
| Wage period | Hourly, daily or monthly |
| Monthly wage basis | How the monthly wage converts to a daily rate |
| Work week | Days per week the basis is calculated from |
These are exactly the fields that are easy to get wrong on a new joiner and expensive to discover later — see Employee payroll settings.
A rule only manages what you tell it to
Each field can be left unmanaged. A rule that sets the wage period and leaves the wage basis alone will not touch the basis — it is not reset, defaulted or cleared.
That matters for two reasons. You can automate the parts that are genuinely standard while leaving genuine exceptions to a person. And a rule cannot quietly overwrite a field you deliberately set differently, as long as you left that field out of the rule.
Which one, when
| You want | Do |
|---|---|
| Every new joiner in a group set up the same way | An automation rule |
| To fix one employee | Edit their payroll settings directly |
| To change everyone's basis at once | A rule, then recalculate affected payslips |
How to create a rule
- Open My Team › Settings › Automations and choose Payroll details.
- Define who the rule applies to.
- Set only the fields the rule should manage; leave the rest unmanaged.
- Save, and check a sample employee's payroll settings to confirm the effect.
What Happens Next
- The rule sets the fields on the employees in its scope.
- Payslips already calculated do not change. Rates are stored at calculation, so recalculate anything that should reflect the new settings.
- Unmanaged fields are left exactly as they were.
Tips
- Automate the wage basis and work week first. They are the fields most often wrong on a new joiner and the ones with the largest downstream effect.
- Leave the wage itself to a person. Automating what someone is paid is a different level of risk from automating how it is expressed.
- Check a sample after any rule change, including someone the rule should not apply to. Scope errors are the common failure.
- Do not build a rule per exception. If you need many rules, the underlying structure — groups, positions — is probably the thing to fix.
- Recalculate deliberately after a rule change. The rule changes the settings; only recalculation changes the money.
Troubleshooting / FAQ
Q: The rule did not apply to an employee. Check the scope. Automations act on the employees they match, and a group or position change moves people in and out.
Q: A field I set by hand was overwritten. That field is managed by a rule. Remove it from the rule if it should stay manual.
Q: The rule applied but payslips are unchanged. Expected — recalculate. Settings changes do not reach calculated payslips.
Q: Can a rule set someone's salary? Payroll details automation manages how pay is expressed and derived, not the wage amount.