Payroll Overview
ianaiERP's Payroll module runs on four building blocks that build on one another: a Pay Structure defines how someone is paid, a Pay Record links a specific employee to a structure, a Pay Period is one payroll run, and a Payslip is the result for one employee in that run. This page covers those four plus the Payroll workspace's Overview screen; tax tracking, year-end, and severance each have their own guide (linked below).
Where it lives
Payroll is a single workspace with a row of tabs, so you never leave the module to move between related screens:
- Overview — the landing tab: the current pay period, a table of recent periods, a setup-health checklist, and a shortcut to run an off-cycle or bonus payroll.
- Pay Periods — every payroll run, past and current.
- Pay Records — the list of employees and the pay structure each one is on.
- Structures — the reusable pay templates.
- Attachments — wage attachments: court-ordered garnishments, child support, and tax levies withheld from an employee's pay. This is separate from payroll tax — see Payroll Tax & Compliance.
Opening YTD, Year-End, Employer Returns, Severance, and Leave Liability live in the same workspace but are covered in Year-End & Severance. Tax Registrations, Tax Ledger, Tax Deposits, Filing Adjustments, and Tax Deadlines are covered in Payroll Tax & Compliance. Opening a pay period or a payslip from a list takes you to its own detail page.
How the four pieces fit together
Pay Structures are templates — a name, a country, a base pay type (salary or hourly), a pay frequency, and a list of components: earnings, deductions, and taxes. Each component can be a flat amount, a percentage, or a calculation method tied to a specific statutory formula (for example, US federal or state withholding, or a country's overtime rules). A component can also link to a compliance rule, so when that rule's rate changes the structure picks it up automatically instead of you re-entering a number. The Add from compliance rule and Add Standard Statutory Package buttons let you pull in your country's synced tax and insurance rules in one step rather than typing each one in by hand.
A Pay Record is what actually puts a structure to work: it points one employee at one structure, with an effective date, a base pay amount, and optional overrides for currency and pay frequency. An employee needs an active pay record before any payslip can be generated for them — if you run "Generate Payslips" and it comes back empty, this is the first place to check. A pay record can also be marked exempt (from overtime) or made inactive without deleting it.
A Pay Period is one run — it has a type (Regular, Bonus, Off-Cycle, or Imported), a pay frequency, a date range, a pay date, and a status (Open, Processing, Closed, or Void). Turning on AutoPilot when you create a regular period tells the scheduler to generate payslips automatically once the period ends, instead of you triggering it by hand; AutoPilot isn't available on Imported periods. The Run Bonus Payroll button on the Overview tab opens a shortcut for one-off runs — pick Bonus for things like a year-end bonus, or Off-Cycle Correction for retroactive pay or a missed-wage fix. For a Bonus or Off-Cycle period, you can pick exactly which employees are included until payslips are generated, after which the set is locked (it becomes the payslips themselves).
Opening a period takes you to its detail page, where payroll is actually run:
- Generate Payslips creates one payslip per active pay record (or, for Bonus/Off-Cycle runs, per selected employee).
- Once payslips exist, you can approve them individually or in bulk (Approve Remaining, or select specific rows), then mark them paid the same way.
- Removing a single employee from a run voids their payslip rather than deleting it, so it stays visible for audit.
- Download Direct Deposit File builds a bank-ready file from the period's approved payslips (NACHA for US companies, a bank-transfer CSV for Korean companies); employees without banking on file are skipped.
- A Statutory Payroll Inputs panel appears when a jurisdiction's rules require extra employee-level figures beyond the payslip itself. Each entry has to be approved by someone other than whoever entered it, and an approved entry is locked — a correction is a new entry that supersedes it, not an edit.
- Korean companies see a Generate Social Insurance Annual Reconciliation option in March and April, for that year's reconciliation filing.
Payslips
A payslip belongs to one employee and one pay period, and moves through Draft → Calculated → Approved → Paid (or Void). Opening one shows:
- Line Items — earnings, deductions, and employee taxes, plus employer contributions, grouped separately.
- Computation — for payslips generated by the current calculator, each line shows the calculation method and the compliance rule it traced to, so you can see exactly how a number was produced.
- Adjustments — corrections made after approval: a bonus, retroactive pay, missed overtime, a reimbursement, or a clawback. Each adjustment is its own approval step and posts its own accounting and year-to-date impact, separate from the original payslip.
- Audit — who approved it, when it was paid, and which journal entries it produced.
Before a payslip is approved, Adjust Pay lets you add an extra earning or override hours, and the whole payslip is recalculated so taxes and totals stay consistent. After approval, Reverse undoes a payslip's accounting and year-to-date effect (keeping the original for audit) rather than editing it directly, and a paid payslip can only be corrected through a new adjustment.
Setup health
The Overview tab shows a Payroll Setup Health checklist so you can see at a glance what's blocking a clean payroll run: compliance rules synced for your country, at least one pay structure created, payroll's accounting (GL) accounts mapped, employees with an active pay record, and an open pay period. It's hidden automatically once everything is green.