Payroll Groups

Payroll Groups define pay cycles for your organization, and this page’s Payroll Policies tab controls how salaries are calculated — including whether attendance and absences affect pay, overtime, rounding, advances and more. Each group specifies the payment frequency, period start day, and payment day, allowing you to manage different payroll schedules for various employee groups.

What you can do here:

• Create payroll groups with different payment frequencies
• Define payroll calculation policies
• Set up approval workflows for payroll runs
• Configure currency and payment schedules

Why Use Payroll Groups?

Payroll groups are essential for organizations that need to:

• Handle Multiple Pay Schedules: Pay different employee groups on different schedules (monthly, bi-weekly, weekly)
• Separate by Region: Manage payroll in different currencies for international teams
• Apply Different Policies: Use different calculation rules for different employee categories
• Control Approval Workflows: Require different approval processes for various payroll runs

Payroll Groups Tab

The Payroll Groups tab lists all configured pay cycles with their settings. Use the Search groups… box to filter by name, or click Add Group to create one.

Group Properties

Creating a Payroll Group

1. Click Add Group
2. Fill in the group details
3. Configure payment schedule
4. Select a payroll policy (optional)
5. Set approval workflow
6. Click Create Group

Group Fields

Payment Frequency Options

Approval Workflows

Payroll Policies Tab

Payroll Policies define the calculation rules used when processing payroll. They control everything from daily rate calculations to overtime multipliers and deduction rules.

Why Use Payroll Policies?

Payroll policies allow you to:

• Standardize Calculations: Ensure consistent payroll calculations across the organization
• Handle Complex Rules: Define overtime rates, absence deductions, and rounding rules
• Manage Features: Enable or disable advances, expense claims, and leave encashment
• Control Limits: Set maximum advance amounts, expense claim limits, and deduction caps

Policy Properties

Creating a Payroll Policy

1. Go to the Payroll Policies tab
2. Click Add Policy
3. Configure calculation rules
4. Set feature toggles and limits
5. Click Create Policy

Basic Information

Daily Rate Calculation

Overtime Settings

Attendance & Absence

Rounding Options

Feature Toggles

Advance Limits

Expense Limits

Approval Workflow

Payslip & Status

How This Actually Works

This page has two settings named “Approval Workflow” that control completely different things — mixing them up is the most common source of wrong answers here:

• The Group-level Approval Workflow (Group Properties table, “Approval” column / Group Fields, line 93-102) gates whether the entire payroll run for that group needs sign-off before it’s paid. The Policy-level Approval Workflow (line 220-224, under a Policy’s own settings) gates something narrower and different: individual payroll adjustments — advances, expense claims, arrears — raised under that policy. A payroll run being unapproved and an advance request being unapproved are two separate workflows; configuring one does nothing to the other.
• Publishing a chain on Approval Chains does not, by itself, make any payroll run require approval. Whether a given group’s runs need sign-off is controlled only by that specific group’s own Approval Workflow field — you still have to open the group and set it, even after the chain exists and is published.
• Advance Limits here (this page, under a Policy → Max Multiplier) cap an advance as a multiple of monthly gross pay for everyone under that policy. This is a different mechanism from Max % of Basic Salary on the Payment Categories page, which caps a specific request category against basic salary only — a smaller number than gross pay. They aren’t interchangeable ways of expressing the same limit.
• A Payroll Policy is optional on a group (“None or select policy”) and one policy can be linked to more than one group — Policy and Group are separate, independently-configured entities, not a 1:1 pair you create together.

Best Practices

• Start with one group: Create a single payroll group initially and add more as needed
• Use descriptive codes: Make codes meaningful (e.g., MONTHLY-USD, WEEKLY-EUR)
• Document policies: Add descriptions explaining why certain calculation methods were chosen
• Test before going live: Run test payrolls to verify calculations before actual pay runs
• Regular audits: Review payroll policies periodically to ensure compliance with changing regulations

Common Scenarios

“We don’t want attendance to affect payroll at all — how do I turn that off?” In the Payroll Policy’s Attendance & Absence section, turn off Enable Attendance Tracking and Enable Absence Deduction. This is separate from the Attendance Settings page — that page controls how attendance is captured, this page’s Policy controls whether it’s used in pay calculations at all.

“We pay a fixed monthly salary no matter how many days someone actually worked — how do I stop the system deducting for absences?” Same fix as above — turn off Enable Absence Deduction in the relevant Payroll Policy. You don’t need to disable attendance tracking itself if you still want records for other purposes (like reports); just turn off the deduction.

“We want our finance team to approve payroll before it’s paid — how do I add that step?” That’s a Payroll Groups setting (not Policy) — set Approval Workflow to a custom workflow instead of “No workflow (direct approve)” when creating or editing the group.

“I want to make sure no one can request a salary advance bigger than one month’s pay — where do I set that limit?” In the Payroll Groups Payroll Policy’s Advance Limits section, set Max Multiplier to 1 — it caps an advance at that multiple of the employee’s monthly gross pay, so 1 means no more than one month’s pay.

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