Payroll

1 What is the Payroll module?

Payroll turns your employee records into a monthly pay run. You set up who works for you and how they are paid once; each period you generate the salaries, adjust for the month’s extras and absences, check what changed, then post — which pays the staff out of a bank account and closes the month.

• Keep employee records, positions, pay components, leave entitlements and document dates.
• Collect the month’s variables — one-off additions and deductions, loan instalments, leave taken.
• Generate the period, review it, and compare it with last month before committing.
• Post the period — the payment journal is written and the payroll month is closed.
• Pay and distribute — the bank transfer file, payslips on paper, by email, on the web or on a phone.

Payroll sits in its own Payroll section of the menu bar, with its own Dashboard, Quick View, Transactions, Masters and Reports. It is a separately licensed module: if you cannot see the section, Payroll is not switched on for your company.

How it meets Accounts

Payroll writes ordinary journal vouchers into Accounts — nothing is kept in a private ledger. There are two of them per month, and knowing which is which explains almost every question about the module:

2 Before you start

Who can do what

Every Payroll screen is a menu item with its own permissions, granted under Tools → User Manager. Payroll uses all of them:

The financial year and its periods

Payroll works one period (calendar month) at a time inside the financial year chosen in the top bar. The periods themselves come from Accounts, so a month exists for payroll only if it exists as an accounting period.

Set-up order

1. Masters — Positions, Payments, Documents, Leave Types (§3). Everything else picks from these.
2. Employees — the register, with each person’s pay components, leave entitlement and documents (§4).
3. Permissions — who may process, who may post, who gets self-service.
4. Alerts — optional, and the cheapest thing in the module: a few minutes to set up, and visas stop expiring unnoticed (§11).

3 Masters — the vocabulary

Under Payroll → Masters. These four lists define the words every employee record and salary line is built from, so create them before adding people.

Positions, payments, documents and leave types can also be loaded from a spreadsheet with Import CSV on their screens, or from Tools → Import (CSV) — see Importing Masters from CSV.

Position

Job titles — Accountant, Operations Officer, Driver. One field, and it prints on the payslip. A position in use on an employee record cannot be deleted.

Payments

The pay components: every earning and every deduction that can appear on a payslip. This is the master that repays careful thought.

A payment cannot be deleted while it is on any employee’s salary lines, or while Payroll Settings name it as the overtime, leave, timesheet or contribution payment; the refusal says where it is used.

Documents

The document types you track per employee — Passport, Visa, Labour Card, Contract. A code and a name; the expiry dates live on each employee record and drive both the Document Expiry report and the daily alert.

Leave Types

Annual, Sick, Unpaid, Compassionate — with the rules that make balances work by themselves.

4 Employees

Payroll → Masters → Employee is the register of everyone on the payroll. Each record carries the personal details, the employment dates, the pay components, leave entitlements, documents, bank details and a photo.

1. Click New — the next employee code is allocated for you.
2. On General, fill the name, Date of Joining, Department, Position and Reports To.
3. On Payments & Deductions, add the fixed monthly components and their amounts.
4. On Leave, add the leave types this person is entitled to, with any opening balance.
5. On Documents, list passport, visa and contract with their expiry dates.
6. On Others, set Pay From A/C — the payroll cannot be posted without it — plus the bank account number and Link to User.
7. Click Save.

The tabs

Dates worth filling in

Three dates on General do more than record history:

• Date of Joining — decides whether the employee is in this month’s run at all, starts their leave accrual, and prorates their first month (§7).
• Confirmation — the end of probation. Feeds the Probation Ending alert.
• Retirement — feeds the Retirement Approaching alert.

An alert can only warn you about a date you have entered; an empty field is simply silent.

Reports To — the reporting line

On the General tab, Reports To names the employee’s supervisor. It does two jobs: it draws the Reporting Structure chart on the Payroll Dashboard, and it decides who approves this person’s leave (§6). Leave it blank and their requests go to the HR desk instead. An employee cannot be set to report to themselves.

Profile tab

The Profile tab holds the parts of an HR record that are not pay: qualifications (education or professional), previous employment and emergency contacts. Tick one contact as Primary — that is the number called first, and ticking a new one clears the old.

Salary change history

Every change to an amount on the Payments & Deductions tab is written to a log that cannot be edited: what it was, what it became, who changed it and when. Type a short Reason for change before saving a raise — the figures record themselves, but only you can say why. The history appears under the grid whenever you edit an employee, and it is the answer to “when did this allowance change, and who approved it?”

Leavers

Set an employee Inactive rather than deleting them. Inactive employees are left out of the next generate but keep their history, their payslips and their ledger account. Use the Active / Inactive / All filter at the top of the list to find them again. Deleting an employee is possible only while nothing refers to them, and it takes their history with it.

Quick View

Payroll → Quick View gives a fast, read-only look at any employee — useful for a phone call you do not want to open the full record for, and safe to grant to people who should look but not touch.

5 The month’s inputs

Three transaction screens feed the salary run with the month’s variables. Enter them before you generate the period, or generate again afterwards so they are picked up.

6 Leave Request — asking and approving

Leave Entry records leave that has already been agreed. Leave Request is the other half: the employee asks, and their supervisor decides.

1. The employee opens Payroll → Transactions → Leave Request and clicks Apply for Leave. Their remaining balance for each leave type is shown at the top of the screen, so they can see what they are spending before they spend it.
2. The request goes to the person named in Reports To on their employee record, who receives a notification. If nobody is named, it goes to the HR users who may edit Leave Entry.
3. The approver opens the Approvals tab and approves, or rejects with a reason. Either way the employee is notified, and a rejection carries the reason back with it.
4. A request can be withdrawn while it is still pending, and after approval up until the day the leave starts.

Requests are visible three ways: Mine, what the signed-in user asked for; Approvals, what is waiting on them; and, for HR, All. Approving is a matter of the reporting line, not the menu: the server checks on every decision that the employee really does report to the person deciding, or that they are HR.

7 Processing a salary period

The heart of the module is Payroll → Transactions → Salary Process. Pick the financial year in the top bar and the month in the period list (it opens on the current month) — each month is labelled Generated or Posted so you can see at a glance where you are.

1. Generate. Click Generate. Ritzy builds each employee’s pay from their fixed components, folds in this month’s add/deductions and loan instalments, accrues a month of leave for everyone, prorates mid-month joiners, and writes the Salary Generation journal.
2. Review. The grid lists every employee with their net pay; select a row to see the payslip lines behind it. Re-generate as often as you like.
3. Check what changed. Click Discrepancy… to compare this month with the one before it.
4. Post. Click Post…, confirm the posting date, tick the employees to pay, and post. This writes the payment journal and closes the payroll month.

What Generate does, in order

• Accrues leave — every employee’s entitlement is advanced to the end of this period (§3).
• Prorates new joiners — anyone who joined inside this month gets an automatic New Joiner Deduction for the days before they started, at one thirtieth of their monthly salary per day. Re-generating recalculates it rather than adding a second one.
• Recalculates leave deductions — each active employee’s Leave Deduction for the month is worked out afresh from their pay as it stands now: one thirtieth of their monthly salary for each day the leave deducts. A raise or cut made after the leave was entered, or leave since removed, shows the next time you generate. A posted month is never changed.
• Includes every active employee who joined on or before the last day of the period. Inactive employees and future joiners are left out.
• Builds the payslips — fixed components first, then this month’s additions and deductions, basic pay at the top.
• Writes the Salary Generation journal — salary expense by department on one side, what each employee is owed on the other.

Checking the month before you post it

Nobody can read two hundred payslips, so the useful question is not “is this right” but “what changed since last month, and did we mean it”. Discrepancy… answers exactly that: it compares this month against the previous generated month and lists only the employees who differ, biggest change first.

• Changed — net pay moved. Expand the row to see which payment or deduction moved, and by how much. An allowance typed with an extra zero shows up here at the top of the list.
• New — paid this month but not last: a joiner, or somebody who should not be on the payroll at all.
• Not paid — paid last month but not this: a leaver, or an employee accidentally left out.
• Employees whose pay is identical are counted but not listed — they are not what you are looking for.

Months that were never generated are skipped when choosing what to compare against, so a gap in processing does not report the whole payroll as new. The Payroll Discrepancy report (§10) runs the same comparison across a range of months.

Posting

Post… opens a dialog with the posting date and the list of employees not yet posted, all ticked. Untick anybody who is not being paid in this run.

• Every employee being posted must have Pay From A/C set on their Others tab — the account the money leaves. Ritzy names the employees missing it and refuses to post rather than guessing.
• The posting date must fall inside this month or later, and inside the same financial year.
• Posting writes the Salary Posting journal — each employee’s account debited, each paying bank account credited — and closes the payroll month. The amount posted for each employee is their net pay: earnings less deductions and less the month’s loan instalments — the same figure as the payslip and the bank transfer file. The instalment stays on the employee’s account, recovering the loan.
• If a colleague posts or changes the same month while your dialog is open, your post is stopped with This payroll was posted (or changed) by someone else meanwhile. Reload and check. Reload the month and look at what was posted before trying again — nothing is posted twice. Generate, Clear and Post of the same month wait for one another, so they can never run over each other.

Clear — the undo, while you still have one

Clear throws away a generated month: the figures, the payslips and the contents of the generation journal (its voucher number is kept and reused next time you generate, unless that journal has been cancelled in Accounts, in which case a new one is raised). Use it when you would rather start the month again than patch it.

8 Payslips and paying the salaries

Paying — the bank transfer file

On Salary Process, click Bank Transfer… for the month. Ritzy shows what it is about to hand the bank — the total, the number of employees, the value date, and a line per person — and Download File writes it as a CSV you can upload or pass to your bank.

• Check the total before you send it. The figure shown is what the file adds up to; it should match the payroll for the month.
• Anyone without a bank account on file is listed but excluded, with their share of the net pay called out separately — so a missing account shows up as a gap you can explain, rather than a file that quietly pays fewer people than the payroll.
• Loan instalments are already deducted. The amount transferred is the net pay the payslip shows.
• If your employees are paid from more than one company bank account, Ritzy says so — most banks want one instruction per account.

The Bank Transfer report (§10) reads the same figures back over a date range, for checking what was paid.

Payslips

Once a period is generated you can hand out payslips from Salary Process or from Reports.

• View / Print — open any employee’s payslip and print it from the preview window.
• Print All — Print All on Salary Process opens the whole period in one preview, each payslip on its own page. It includes employees whose Payslip Delivery is Print or Print & Email, and tells you how many it left out.
• Email — send one payslip, or use Email All for the whole period in one go. This uses the SMTP settings under Tools → Preferences, and the Payslip Delivery choice on each employee’s Others tab decides who is printed, emailed, both or neither.
• Self-service — the My Payslip report, the My HR screen and the Ritzy Employee phone app all let staff fetch their own (§9).

9 My HR and the phone app

Payroll → My HR is the payroll module turned around to face the employee. Whoever opens it sees their own record and nobody else’s — the page works out who you are from your login, so it can be given to staff who have no other payroll access at all.

• Payslips — every closed month, with net pay, and a Payslip button that opens the printable slip.
• Leave — the balance for each leave type, the history of leave taken, and a shortcut to apply for more.
• Documents — passport, visa and contract expiry dates, with anything inside 90 days highlighted.
• Loans — outstanding staff loans and how much has been repaid (the tab is hidden if there are none).
• Contract — their employment contracts, and the place they sign one HR has issued to them. A dot on the tab means a contract is waiting for their signature (§13).
• My Details — position, department, who they report to, joining and confirmation dates, contact and bank details.

On a phone

The same screen exists as a phone app, Ritzy Employee. On My HR, click Phone App to show the install QR code — staff scan it and the app installs, with no address to dictate. The app adds push notifications, so an employee hears when their leave is decided and a supervisor hears when a request arrives. It needs the same two things as the web screen, and nothing more. See the Mobile Apps manual for the detail.

10 Reports

Under Payroll → Reports. Each one previews on screen and prints from the preview window; grids export to CSV.

11 Daily alerts

Payroll can send a once-a-day notification for each of the dates worth knowing about in advance. Open Payroll → Document Expiry Alert, turn the master switch on, then enable the alerts you want and choose who receives each one. An alert with no recipients sends nothing.

12 Dashboard & reporting structure

Payroll → Dashboard summarises the module at a glance: headcount, the state of the current period, recent joiners, documents about to expire and anything waiting on a decision.

It also draws the Reporting Structure — the organisation chart built from each employee’s Reports To. Expand a branch to see a supervisor’s team. Below it, Ritzy tells you how many employees have no supervisor set; that is the same list whose leave requests fall to the HR desk, so it is worth keeping short.

The Contracts Ending card lists active contracts that end in the next 60 days (or already have), with how many contracts are waiting for a signature and how many active employees have no contract at all. Click a row to open that contract.

13 Employment contracts

Payroll → Transactions → Employment Contracts records what each employee agreed to — the contract type and term, probation, notice, working hours, leave, the salary package and any benefits — and gets it signed.

Drafting a contract

1. Click New (or New Contract on the employee’s Contracts tab) and choose the employee.
2. Ritzy fills the form in for you: position and department from the employee record, the salary from their current fixed pay components, and the working terms and clauses from their last contract — or, for a first contract, from the company’s most recent one.
3. Check the Contract Type and dates. Fixed-term and Temporary contracts need an end date; Unlimited and Part-time may be open-ended.
4. Adjust the salary lines if the offer differs from the payroll. Load from payroll copies the current fixed pay again.
5. Write any Other benefits (housing, air ticket, medical) and review the Terms and conditions. The standard clauses supplied with Ritzy defer to “applicable labour law” — replace them with your own wording; the next contract you draft starts from what you wrote.
6. Click Save. The contract is a Draft until it is issued.

Getting it signed

Once signed, the contract is Active and the signature, name and date print on it. If the employee sends it back instead, it returns to Draft with their comment shown at the top — amend it and issue it again. To change an issued contract before it is signed, Withdraw it first.

The life of a contract

Renew drafts the next contract from an active one: the same terms and clauses, starting the day after the current one ends and running for the same length. The current contract stays active until the renewal is signed, then becomes Renewed. Terminate ends the contract record only — deactivate the employee and settle their final pay separately.

Word templates

Word / PDF merges the contract into a Word layout from Payroll → Masters → Contract Templates. Ritzy supplies a Standard Employment Contract; download it, change it in Word (your letterhead, a second language, extra paragraphs) and upload it back, or add others. The placeholder list on that screen shows what each {placeholder} fills in. PDF needs LibreOffice on the server; Word files always work. Print needs no template at all.

Staying ahead of end dates

Turn on the Employment Contracts Ending daily alert (§11), watch the Dashboard card (§12), and run the Contract Register report (§10). A contract drops off the alert as soon as a renewal is started.

14 Timesheet (add-on)

Timesheet is an add-on to Payroll, licensed on its own. It records the hours each employee works every day, by job, site and location, and turns the month’s overtime and leave into payroll lines. When it is installed, Payroll gets a Timesheet section with three screens: Timesheet, Post Timesheet and Timesheet Reports. The Work Site and Work Location masters appear under Masters. The DBA adds it from DBA Console → Modules, and the licence must include it.

Setting it up

1. Post Timesheet → Settings:
   • Set the Normal Hours of a working day and the company’s Overtime Factor (1.25 is time and a quarter).
   • Choose the Overtime Payment, an addition (pay type 3), and the Leave Deduction, a deduction (pay type 4).
   • Choose the Annual Leave Type.
2. On the same tab, tick the working days of the Work Week. A day’s hours can be set when they differ from the normal hours, as on a short Thursday. Add the year’s Holidays too.
3. Create the Work Locations and the Work Sites within them. A job’s site comes from the job.
4. On each employee who fills a timesheet, open the Timesheet tab and tick On timesheet. Then fill in:
   • their working hours and breaks, which start each new day;
   • their own overtime factor, if it differs from the company’s;
   • their default site;
   • any Work Schedule periods, such as Ramadan hours, which override the company’s hours and holidays for those dates.

Entering a day

In Timesheet, choose the department and the date.

• Every employee on timesheet in that department gets a row. It starts from their hours and breaks, or from the leave entered for them in Leave Entry.
• Change the job, site and times where the day was different. Expand a row (+) for slots 2–4, the breaks and a remark.
• Type times as 8, 830, 8:30 or 17.5. A slot ends on the same day; a time out before the time in shows in red and counts nothing.
• Pick a leave type under Attendance for a day off. That clears the times.
• Copy Previous Day repeats the last day entered for everyone who is present.

Click Save to keep the day. The dates already entered this month are shown above the grid. Click one to open it.

Posting the month

Post Timesheet → Monthly Summary shows each employee’s hours, overtime and leave for the month, and the amounts:

• Overtime = OT hours × salary ÷ 30 ÷ 8 × overtime factor.
• Annual leave is deducted at (salary + allowances) ÷ days in the month, because leave salary is paid separately.
• Unpaid leave and short hours are deducted at salary ÷ days in the month.
• Other paid leave, such as sick leave, is not deducted.

Post Timesheet writes these into Additions / Deductions as Timesheet Overtime and Timesheet Leave Deduction lines. Then run Salary Process as usual. Posting locks the month’s days.

• Post Again replaces the lines after a correction.
• Unpost takes them out and reopens the days.

Once the month’s payroll is posted, neither is possible.

Reports

Timesheet Reports adds up the hours of a date range in one or two levels. Each level can be job, site, location, department, employee, day or month: job then employee, for example. The Detail view lists every slot. Export saves either view as a CSV file for Excel.

15 Messages, tips & FAQ

Messages you may see

A new joiner’s first month

Mid-month joiners are prorated automatically from their joining date, as a New Joiner Deduction line on the payslip. Make sure the joining date on the employee record is right — everything else follows from it.

Somebody is missing from the run

Generate includes active employees who joined on or before the last day of the period. So check three things in order: are they Active, is their Date of Joining inside or before this month, and have they any pay components on Payments & Deductions?

The payslip does not match what I entered

Add/deductions belong to a specific financial year and period, and the salary was built when you last generated. Confirm the entry is against the right month, then generate the period again.

Deductions and the payslip

Deductions are stored and shown as negative amounts, so the payslip nets down to the correct take-home figure. The bank transfer file and My HR both use that same net figure, with loan instalments already taken off.

Leave that never seems to accrue

Accrual happens when a payroll period is generated, using Days per Year on the leave type and the employee’s joining date. A leave type with Days per Year of zero never accrues — which is right for unpaid leave and wrong for annual.

Keep the reporting line filled in

Every employee with a supervisor in Reports To is one whose leave request routes itself, and one more branch on the organisation chart. The Dashboard counts the ones still missing.