Pay Items
The five types, how amount × period × count produces a payslip line, and where items live.
A pay item is one line on a payslip — a salary, an allowance, a deduction, a tax. Items live in two places, and it matters which one you are editing.
| Where | What it is | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Employee record → Payroll Management | The person's standing rates. | Used to build the *next* pay run. Never changes a run that already exists. |
| Pay run editor → Pay items | What this particular run pays. | Changes this run only, and only while it is a draft. |
The five types
| Type | Direction | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | Adds to gross pay | Basic salary, overtime, bonus, commission |
| Benefit (non-cash) | Recorded, not paid in cash | Company car, accommodation, non-cash benefits |
| Allowance | Adds to gross pay | Housing, transport, meals, medical |
| Deduction | Comes off net pay | Loan repayment, union dues, advance recovery, garnishment |
| Tax | Comes off net pay | Income tax, social security, statutory levies |
Amount, period and count
Every item carries three numbers, and the payslip line is the product of them.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Amount | The rate, as a plain number. The currency is your business currency — it is never typed on the item. |
| Period | What the rate is per: Monthly, Weekly, Every two weeks, Daily, Hourly, Quarterly, Annually, One-time. |
| Count | How many of that period this item covers. |
An hourly rate of 18.50 with a count of 160 is a monthly figure of 2,960.00. A daily rate of 25.00 with a count of 20 is 500.00. Changing the period sets a default count you can overwrite:
| Period | Default count |
|---|---|
| Hourly | 160 |
| Daily | 20 |
| Weekly | 4 |
| Every two weeks | 2 |
| Quarterly | 0.333 |
| Annually | 0.083 |
| Monthly / One-time | 1 |
Amount and count are stored exactly as typed. The monthly figure is computed server-side, so the number on the payslip, the number in the pay run total, the number in the journal and the number on the bank file are all the same number from the same place.
Taxable
Each item is marked taxable or not. This is what tells a tax item what it is calculating against.
The daily rule
A daily item behaves differently from every other period, and it is worth knowing before you build a daily payroll.
A daily item resolves to zero unless its rate is above zero and its count is two or more. One day on a daily rate pays nothing. If that is not what you intended, the run's Review step will flag the person as No pay — which is the check that catches it.
Where a run carries daily items, the People step gains an editable Days column and an Import days action, so day counts can come from a spreadsheet rather than being typed one at a time.
When the amount is not a number you type
Some items are a rule rather than a rate — a pension that is a percentage of basic salary, an allowance that differs by location, a tax with bands. On a pay run those are set up through Add pay item, which offers five ways of working the amount out. See Calculated pay items.
Changing an item on one run only
In the pay run editor, open the item and edit that person's row in the sheet. It changes this run and nothing else — the employee's standing rate is untouched.
To change what someone is paid going forward, edit their record instead: Employee → Payroll Management → Edit pay items.
Both the hire page and the Payroll Management tab send the complete list of items on save. An item you removed is gone from the employee — and will be absent from the next run. Existing items are always preloaded, so a straight re-save changes nothing.
Bulk changes
On a draft run, four tools change many people at once — Add pay item, Update from CSV, Remove items, and Changes, which lists everything you have altered in the session. See Pay items on a run.
To change rates for many people going forward rather than on one run, use Import on the pay schedules list — see Importing employees for the columns a payroll-item file carries.