Payroll
Monthly, daily and hourly payroll with configurable tax slabs, allowances and deductions.
Payroll is where salary policy, attendance and money meet. Each employee carries a salary setup — monthly, daily or hourly — and each organisation carries one or more payroll setup profiles holding the rules: pay schedule, per-day salary method, tax slabs, overtime slabs, auto-deduction rules and PF and VPS policy. Run payroll for a month and the engine reads all of it together, producing a payslip per employee with gross, tax, deductions and net pay — every line itemised, nothing hidden in a black box.
The calculations are the ones Pakistani payroll teams actually run. Progressive income-tax slabs you can see and edit, with the Pakistan FY 2026-27 salary slabs available to load in one click. Attendance-based deductions charged in fractions of a day's salary for lates, absences, half days and missing punches. Overtime paid from approved requests at per-category rates. Provident fund and VPS shares split between employee and employer, with the employer's share shown for information rather than deducted.
The wording matters here: the module records registration details such as EOBI, and deducts the lines you configure, rather than computing statutory contributions on your behalf. What you set up is what gets calculated, and every payslip shows its own working — so the numbers are auditable by anyone who can open the breakdown.
HR and payroll administrators run the module through a per-form permission matrix enforced on the interface and the API. Employees get a self-service side where they apply for advance salary, loans, overtime, reimbursements and PF withdrawals, and each request type can be routed through approval or auto-approved — your call, per type.
How Payroll works
Policy lives in named payroll setups
A payroll setup is a named profile of every rule the engine uses, organised in sub-tabs: Pay Schedule (monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, twice a month or bi-monthly, with configurable month start and end days), Payroll Option, Payslip Items, Tax Rules, Salary Setting, Overtime, Auto Deductions, Final Settlement, VPS Policy and PF Policy. You can keep several profiles, copy one as the starting point for another, and map individual employees to a specific profile — the org-active profile is only the default for everyone unmapped, and activation is a deliberate Set Active action, never a side effect.
The details go deep where payroll needs them to. Eleven per-day salary calculation methods (annual gross over 365, 360, 312, working days in the month and more) decide what one day of pay is worth everywhere it is used. Payslip options control the printed slip: format, signature blocks, footer text, your logo, and toggles for showing leave balance, PF and VPS contributions and the overtime calculation.
Tax rules you can read
Tax Rules is a slab grid — from, to, rate, exempted amount, additional amount — applied progressively so each bracket taxes only the slice of income inside it, on a monthly or annual basis. For PKR payrolls, a built-in reference panel shows the Pakistan FY 2026-27 salary slabs alongside a monthly tax estimator, and can pre-fill the grid with all eight slabs in one click.
Per-employee exceptions are supported: a flat tax percentage on an employee's salary setup overrides the slabs, and a tax-exempt flag zeroes their tax entirely. Whether attendance penalties reduce taxable income, and whether overtime is taxable, are both switches you control.
Every employee gets a salary setup
The Salary Setup form defines pay per person. Monthly salaries are built from a breakup grid of salary items with computed monthly and annual gross; hourly and daily staff get regular hours, rates and daily wages amounts, with pay-for-holiday toggles. Each employee can carry their own overtime rates per category — working day, holiday, gazetted holiday, special holiday — as fixed amounts or multiples of their per-hour salary, plus short-time rates and recurring allowance and deduction rows with taxable, on-present and leave-applicable conditions.
Payment details are recorded alongside: bank or cash, employer's bank from a Pakistani bank list — HBL, Meezan, Bank Alfalah, Faysal, Bank Islami — branch and transaction type such as online transfer, IBFT or cheque. A fixed deduction type field records income tax, EOBI, provident fund or loan against the employee.
Run payroll, then read every number
Run Payroll asks for the month, year, payslip period and payslip type, lets you tick exactly which employees to include, and generates a draft payslip per person. For each one, the engine totals the month's attendance flags (skipping weekends, gazetted holidays, approved leave and days that have not finished yet), applies your auto-deduction rules, adds overtime earnings from approved requests, computes PF and VPS shares, takes tax on the resulting taxable income and lands on net pay.
The Process Payroll grid shows the result with fifteen filters — station, department, sub-department, employee group, payroll setup, employee, period, month, year, payslip type, disbursement state and more — active filters displayed as removable chips. Every row opens a breakdown: gross, overtime, tax, recurring and attendance deductions, employer contributions, and each itemised line such as Absent Deduction (2 Days) with its unit amount.
Approve, hold and distribute
Payslips move through three statuses — Draft, Processed, Paid — so nothing is disbursed by accident. From Processed there are two routes to Paid: Payslip Approvals lists processed payslips for sign-off, singly or in bulk, and approving a slip marks it paid; Process Salary Distribution filters processed runs by month and year and distributes them, per row or in bulk, to the same paid status. Along the way, any payslip can be put on Hold: held slips are excluded from disbursement until released, without their amounts changing.
Payroll Approvals is the matching inbox for money requests: one filterable queue across every payroll request type, showing the requester, request details and approval trail.
Requests, loans and advances
Sixteen request types cover the money questions employees actually ask: advance salary, leave encashment, overtime, allowance, tax adjustment, deduction, bonus, reimbursement, commission, loan, loan adjustment, salary changes, PF withdrawal, profit fund, fund management and hold salary. Each has its own form — a loan captures type, amount, monthly repayment and repayment start date; a reimbursement itemises dated line entries with category and receipt number; leave encashment previews the amount from the employee's leave balance before anything is saved.
Payroll Settings holds a per-type approval toggle for all of them — set a type to No and those requests auto-approve; leave it on and they queue for sign-off. These queues are the approval register and audit trail for each request. Overtime feeds the pay run directly; the other types are recorded here for review and are not yet auto-posted as payslip lines — the amount each posts, its taxability and any repayment schedule are applied by HR when the pay run is prepared.
Features
Attendance-aware deductions
Auto-deduction rules per attendance flag — late, half day, short day, early, absent, absent for short time — each with a trigger count, exempted occurrences, once-or-every-occurrence frequency and a deduction amount from a specified figure to fractions of a day's salary. Missing punches and short-time days have their own configurable treatment.
Overtime from approved requests
Overtime is earned, not typed in: approved overtime requests are summed per category and paid at the configured rate, with per-hour salary derived from the per-day method and your hours-per-day setting. Rounding intervals, taxability and monthly limits are all switches in the setup.
PF and VPS policies
Provident fund and VPS are configured as percentage of basic, percentage of gross or fixed amounts, with separate employee and employer shares. The employee share is deducted from net pay; the employer share appears on the breakdown as a contribution without net impact, and an include-in-tax flag decides whether the employee share is tax-exempt.
Pro-rata joins and exits
Pre-joining and post-leaving days in a partial month are deducted (or added back as an allowance) automatically at per-day salary, with your choice of whether weekends and gazetted holidays inside the gap count. Move To FnF marks the payslip for final settlement in the grid.
Payslips built for printing
Choose a payslip format, up to three signature blocks, footer text and a logo. The full payslip view assembles the employee header, earnings, deductions, year-to-date totals, leave balances and the net amount written out in words, ready to print or save.
Gratuity and final settlement rules
Final Settlement configuration covers notice-period requirements and a full gratuity policy: applicable from joining or confirmation date, basic or gross basis, slab-wise or flat percentage, day-wise or month-wise counting, taxability and whether loans can be recovered from gratuity.
A settings ledger for the numbers around payroll
Payroll Settings records opening PF balances per employee, fiscal-year periods with a current year that drives year-to-date figures, general loan types, forex exchange rates for multi-currency payrolls, CPR entries recording tax deposited, withholding-tax types and default salary-distribution splits.
Employee self-service
Employees apply for advance salary, leave encashment, overtime (including a multi-day grid pre-filled from days they worked beyond schedule), reimbursements, loans, loan adjustments and PF withdrawals from their own payroll page, each form showing their last ten requests alongside.
Permission-gated end to end
Every rail tab is gated by the per-form permission matrix, and the server enforces the same keys — generating a run requires the Process Payroll add permission, processing and paying require update. Leavers' payslips stay retrievable for audit rather than disappearing with the employee.
Used by: HR and payroll administrators run payroll; employees submit payroll requests and view payslips.
Works with the rest of Nexa People
Payroll reads the month straight out of Attendance: recorded punches are classified against each employee's shift and its flag rules, approved leave from the Leave module turns would-be absences into leave days (half-day leave included), and gazetted holidays and your organisation's weekend settings are skipped rather than penalised. Leave encashment requests draw on the same leave balances that the Leave module maintains.
Every salary setup and payslip is keyed to an employee record from Employee Management, and the payroll grids filter by the station, department, sub-department and employee group defined in the Organization module. Separation picks up where payroll stops: the Employee Separation module's settlement run reads each leaver's salary setup — the same record payroll pays from — to work out earned salary for the final month, and the settlement toggle in payroll's per-type approval settings decides whether it queues for sign-off or auto-approves; payroll's own Final Settlement tab keeps gratuity and notice-period rules on record. The Reports module carries the payroll report set — payroll summary, salary payout, deduction, loan ledger, PF ledger and yearly tax among them — over the records this module writes.
Frequently asked questions
Which pay frequencies and salary types are supported?
Employees can be salaried monthly, hourly or daily, and the pay schedule can be monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, twice a month or bi-monthly with configurable month start and end days. Monthly staff are paid from a salary breakup of named items; hourly and daily staff from rates and wage amounts, with optional pay for holidays and gazetted holidays.
How is income tax worked out?
From the slab grid in your payroll setup, applied progressively so each bracket taxes only the income inside it, on a monthly or annual basis. PKR payrolls can load the Pakistan FY 2026-27 salary slabs in one click and preview monthly tax for any salary. A per-employee flat percentage overrides the slabs where needed, and a tax-exempt flag zeroes an individual's tax entirely.
What happens to lates, absences and missing punches?
Whatever your rules say. Each attendance flag gets its own deduction rule — trigger count, exempted occurrences, frequency and an amount expressed as a fraction or multiple of per-day salary — and absences beyond the exempted days are charged at a configurable daily rate. Only completed days count: the in-progress day and future dates are never charged, and weekends, gazetted holidays and approved leave are excluded before any penalty is computed.
Can different groups of employees follow different payroll rules?
Yes. You can maintain several named payroll setups — created blank or copied from an existing one — and map any employee to a specific profile through their salary setup. Employees without a mapping use the organisation's active profile, and switching the active profile is an explicit action, so payroll never silently computes with the wrong rules.
How do loans and advance salary work?
A loan request records the type, amount, monthly repayment and repayment start date, and the employee's loan history with pending balances shows beside the form. Loan adjustments handle changes to the amount or repayment, including balloon payments. Advance salary requests flow through the same request-and-approval path, and your payroll setup keeps your advance-salary preferences on record — a percentage cap, a limit per fiscal year, and waiting periods from the payroll start date or joining date — as written-down policy.
What gets approved before money moves?
Two layers. Requests first: each of the sixteen payroll request types has its own approval toggle, so anything from a bonus to a salary change can require sign-off or auto-approve. Then payslips: every run starts as a draft and is processed before anything can be paid; from there a slip is marked paid either through Payslip Approvals — where slips can also be put on hold to keep them out of disbursement — or through Process Salary Distribution, which distributes processed runs by month and year.
Do employees see their own payslips?
Yes. The dashboard's payslip view assembles the full slip — earnings, deductions, year-to-date totals, leave balances and the amount in words — for printing or saving, and the self-service reports include a payslips report. What any user can reach is controlled by the same role and permission matrix used across Nexa People.
Related modules
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