Review and approve a payroll run

What this achieves

A payroll run submitted for review waits for a second administrator to approve it before it can be finalised. This exists so no single person can prepare and release a company’s pay on their own.

Required role: Administrator. The person who initiated the run cannot approve it.

Steps

Go to Payroll → Payroll Runs.
Open the run showing as In review.
Check the totals and the draft payslips.
Select Approve, or Reject to send it back.

You cannot approve your own run

Separation of duties is enforced. If you initiated the run, the approve action is unavailable to you and Humavera says so directly — a different administrator has to approve it.

Example: Priya Raman prepares HC Corp UK Ltd’s March 2026 run. She cannot approve it, so Daniel Okonkwo does. If Priya were the only administrator, the run could not proceed, which is the intended outcome rather than a fault.

Where an approval workflow is bound to payroll, approval is handled through the workflow instead, and the assigned approver acts on it from their own task list rather than from the run.

What to check

Approving is a decision, not a formality. The run is about to become immutable.

Option	Description
Employees	Does the headcount match what you expect for this group and period?
Gross	Does gross pay move as expected against the prior period?
Deductions	Are statutory deductions present and plausible for the jurisdiction?
Net	Is anyone’s net pay unexpectedly zero or unusually large?
Employer cost	Does the employer’s own cost move with gross, or has something diverged?

Example: at HC Corp UK Ltd, a gross figure that jumps without a corresponding headcount change usually means a new eligibility rule reached more people than intended — worth resolving before approval rather than after finalisation.

Explain this run narrates the variance against the prior period and flags anomalies such as a net pay swing, a large element change, or a new loan deduction. Use it as a prompt for where to look. It is advisory and changes nothing.

Rejecting

Rejecting returns the run so it can be corrected and recalculated. Prefer rejecting over approving something you do not understand — a run that has not been finalised is still cheap to fix.

What happens next

Once approved, the run is ready to finalise. Finalising locks every payslip as immutable and closes the pay period, and cannot be undone. A correction after that point becomes an off-cycle run or an adjustment in a later period rather than an edit.