Salary computed from the month you closed
Structures assembled from rules you write, a run that refuses to proceed on an unfinalised month, and a slip that carries a plain-language explanation of every figure on it.
The salary spreadsheet with formulas nobody dares touch
Payroll by spreadsheet fails in two places: the attendance figures are copied in by hand, and the formula that produced last month’s deduction is invisible by the time somebody queries it. Here the attendance comes from the closed month and every line on the slip has a recorded computation behind it.
A salary workbook with one sheet per month
Attendance totals retyped from the register
Payslips built from a Word mail-merge
A deduction nobody can explain a month later
Payroll, screen by screen
Each of these is a screen or a service in the module rather than a heading on a roadmap.
Structures per employee, effective from a date
A basic, allowances as either a percentage of basic or a fixed amount, and deductions as a percentage of basic, a percentage of gross, a fixed amount or a slab. Allowances carry a taxable flag; deductions carry a mandatory flag. Gross and net are computed and stored alongside so a later reading can be checked against them.
Attendance-driven, not attendance-adjacent
The run reads the finalised month: present days, absent days, approved leave, leave without pay and lates. Absent-day and leave-without-pay deductions come off a per-day rate derived from the structure, and lates accumulate — three of them count as a day.
It refuses to run on an open month
If attendance for the month has not been finalised, the engine stops with that as the reason rather than computing salary against a half-marked register. It also refuses to generate a second record for an employee who already has one for that month.
A run you can inspect before you commit
The run reports who was processed and who was skipped with the reason — no structure, no attendance, wrong employee type — instead of silently omitting them. A run that ends in draft is a failed run, and it keeps the failure reason.
The slip explains itself
Every record carries a computation log in plain language, so “why is my salary short this month” is answered by reading the slip rather than by reverse-engineering a formula. Slips render to PDF for one employee or a batch.
A lifecycle, then a payment record
Generated, approved, paid or on hold — with the approver, the payment mode and the payment reference recorded on the record when it is settled.
The same row, read from somewhere else
The point of an ERP is not that it has a lot of modules. It is that a fee concession, an attendance shortfall and a report card are all reading one record. These are the places Payroll touches.
Attendance
The finalised staff month is the input. This is the one hard dependency in the platform: close attendance, then run payroll.
Reports
Payroll records are Firestore rows like everything else, so month-on-month cost is a query rather than a workbook.
Students
Staff and students are separate registers with a shared shape, so the same session, school and audit conventions apply to both.
What Payroll does not do
Stated here rather than discovered in week three. If something you need is on this list, ask before you buy — it is a better conversation than the one after.
Payment is recorded, not executed. Mode, reference and paid date go on the record; no bank file is produced and there is no banking connection.
Statutory deductions are rules you configure — PF, professional tax, TDS, a slab you enter. There is no tax engine, no Form 16, and nothing that files a return.
Slips are PDFs you download, print or attach to an email you send yourself. Nothing is dispatched by the product.
A structure is per employee with an effective-from date, so a mid-year revision means a new structure rather than an edit to the old one — which is the right behaviour for an audit and an extra step at the counter.
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