Payroll

What this achieves

Payroll turns your employee records into payslips, applying the tax and insurance rules of the country each person is employed in. It runs as a governed cycle with a review and an approval step, so nobody pays a workforce on the strength of one person’s spreadsheet.

Configuration and operation are different jobs

This is the distinction to hold on to, because the pages beneath this one divide along it. Configuration is work you do rarely and check carefully. Operation is what happens every period.

Option	Description
Configuration	Pay elements, pay groups, statutory profiles, eligibility rules, loan policies, commission plans, and bank export formats. Set up once, revisited when something changes.
Operation	Creating a run, calculating it, reviewing, approving, finalising, and producing payslips, reports, and payment files. Repeated every period.

Getting configuration right is what makes operation uneventful. Most payroll problems are a configuration decision discovered late, not a mistake made during a run.

Two rules that are easy to get backwards

Both produce figures that look plausible and are wrong, which is the most expensive kind of error in this section.

A pay element defines what is paid and how it is taxed — never how much. The amount comes from whatever grants the element: an eligibility rule, or a figure entered on the employee.

Example: at HC Corp UK Ltd, a London travel allowance element says the allowance is taxable and whether it enters the social-insurance base. It does not say £250. The £250 comes from the eligibility rule that grants it.

Income-tax brackets are annual; contribution thresholds are monthly. They are entered on the same statutory profile in different units, because that is how each is defined in law.

Example: for HC Corp UK Ltd, PAYE bands go in as annual thresholds while National Insurance goes in as a contribution with monthly ones. Entering either in the other’s units produces deductions that are wrong for everyone in the entity.

Payroll is multi-country

Humavera runs payroll in several countries with certified statutory rules maintained by Humavera, each carrying that country’s real statutory logic rather than a generic percentage. The United Kingdom is the example used throughout this documentation; it is not the limit.

Each legal entity carries its own jurisdiction, so a company operating in more than one country runs correct payroll in each. There is no exchange rate anywhere in Humavera: consolidated reporting is segmented by currency and never blended.

Example: HC Corp pays through four entities in GBP, USD, XOF, and EGP, so a consolidated report shows four currency blocks, never one figure.

A run is reviewed before it is paid

A pay run moves from draft, through gathering inputs and calculation, to review, approval, and finalisation. The person who starts a run cannot approve it — separation of duties is enforced, so a second administrator has to look.

Once finalised, a payslip is frozen. It keeps a step-by-step calculation trace an auditor can replay, and later changes to salary or configuration do not rewrite it.

Example: if Priya Raman prepares the March 2026 run, Daniel Okonkwo approves it. A pay rise applied in April does not alter what March’s payslips say.

Payroll also reads from the rest of the product: leave supplies unpaid absence, time and attendance supplies reconciled days, compensation supplies approved salary changes, and loans and commission supply their own deductions and payouts.

Where to start

Setting payroll up

Work through these in order. Each topic comes in a pair: the Setup Considerations page covers the decision and what it costs to change later, and the page beside it covers doing it.

Page	What it covers
Setup Considerations: pay elements	How granular to make your catalogue, and how tax treatment is decided.
Add a pay element	Creating an earning, deduction, or employer contribution.
Setup Considerations: pay groups	What forces a separate group, and how many runs you are choosing to process.
Set up a pay group	Grouping employees paid on one calendar under one legal entity.
Setup Considerations: statutory profiles	Where your figures come from, effective dating, and who is accountable for them.
Create a statutory profile	Entering the tax and insurance rules for a jurisdiction.
Setup Considerations: eligibility rules	When to pay by rule rather than per employee, and how overlapping rules resolve.
Create an eligibility rule	Granting a pay element to everyone matching your criteria.
Set up a loan policy	Capping what employees can borrow, per loan type and entity.
Create a commission plan	Defining how sales performance turns into pay.
Set commission targets	Setting each person’s target for a period against a plan.
Create a bank export format	Matching your bank’s payment-file layout.
Configure payroll settings	Workspace-wide payroll policy, which lives under Settings rather than here.

The first four pairs are the ones every workspace needs. Loans, commission, and bank export apply only if you use them.

Commission sits in payroll rather than in compensation because it is paid through the payroll run. Compensation covers salary changes and awards.

Running payroll each period

Once configuration is in place, this is the work that repeats. The first two pages are the cycle itself; the rest happen alongside it or after it.

Page	What it covers
Run a payroll cycle	Creating a run, gathering inputs, calculating, and finalising.
Review and approve a payroll run	Approving as the second administrator, and what to check first.
Issue an employee loan	Lending against payroll, repaid by automatic deduction each run.
Approve a commission batch	Deciding a period’s computed commission, and reading the working.
Release variable compensation	Settling a held pool against an achievement percentage.
Produce payroll reports	Statutory summary, cost by department, year-end certificates, and the payment file.
Read consolidated reports	Rolling up across legal entities, segmented by currency.
Generate US tax forms	Producing US forms from finalised payroll, where you have a US entity.

When something goes wrong, or somebody leaves:

Page	What it covers
Setup Considerations: corrections	Choosing between an off-cycle run and an adjustment in the next period.
Create an off-cycle run	Paying a correction or a supplemental payment outside the calendar.
Run a final settlement	Computing everything owed to a leaver on their partial final period.

What employees and managers see of their own pay:

Page	What it covers
View your payslips	Finding and reading your own payslips, loans, and commission.
View your team’s commission	A manager’s read-only view of where their reports stand.

What happens next

Start with configuration: legal entities, pay groups, pay elements, and a statutory profile covering the period. Once those exist, each period becomes a run to prepare, review, approve, and finalise — producing payslips, statutory and cost reports, and a bank payment file.