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Payroll is how Hitaji 360 turns each employee’s agreed pay into a calculated payslip, money in their pocket, taxes paid to the authorities, and the right numbers in your books. It is the busiest, highest-stakes corner of HR — a mistake here is felt the same day — so the module is built to be deliberate: you set things up once, then each pay cycle follows the same predictable chain. This page is the conceptual front door. It explains how the pieces fit together so the detailed pages make sense. If you are setting payroll up for the first time, read this top to bottom; if you run payroll every month, skip to Running payroll. You’ll find this at: /payroll
📷 Screenshot: the Payroll runs list with the year/status filters and the “New Payroll” button — to be added.
Hitaji 360 is multi-business. Salary components, structures, periods, tax slabs, runs and payslips all belong to one business (and its accounting book). Before you set anything up or run payroll, confirm the correct business is selected in the business switcher at the top of the app — payroll posts real money and real journal entries into whichever book you are pointed at.

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The payroll chain, end to end

Payroll in Hitaji 360 runs through a fixed sequence. Each link feeds the next:
  1. Salary components — the building blocks: individual earnings (basic, allowances, bonuses) and deductions (loan repayments, voluntary contributions), plus the statutory items (PAYE, NSSF, LST) that the system computes for you. See Salary components.
  2. Salary structures — reusable templates that combine components into a complete pay package, with formulas where amounts depend on other values. See Salary structures.
  3. Assignment — a structure is assigned to an employee’s contract from a given date, with that employee’s base pay. The active assignment is what makes an employee appear in a run. See Salary structures → Assigning a structure.
  4. Payroll period — the pay cycle (e.g. “May 2026”) that a run is for. See Payroll periods.
  5. Income-tax slabs — the PAYE bands used to compute income tax during a run. See Income-tax slabs.
  6. Payroll run — for one period you create, generate (compute slips), then submit/approve (this posts the accrual to the ledger). See Running payroll.
  7. Payslips — the per-employee breakdown of gross, deductions and net pay produced by the run. See Payslips.
  8. Payment — you record the cash going out (in full or in instalments), reducing what you owe each employee.
  9. Statutory remittance — the PAYE, NSSF and LST withheld are paid over to the authorities (URA, NSSF).
  10. General ledger — every step above writes balanced double-entry journal entries so your accounts always reflect payroll.
If you do these in order the first time, every later pay cycle is just steps 4–9 repeated.

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A quick map of the module

The setup pages (components, structures, periods, tax slabs, settings) live under Settings → ERP → Finance. The old /payroll/setup/... links still work — they redirect to the settings location.

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Who can do what — payroll permissions

Every action is gated by a permission slug on your role. The four payroll slugs you will meet across these pages: There is also payroll:period-reopen for the higher-risk action of reopening a closed period (typically HR managers and SuperAdmins only). The split between payroll:write (the maker who prepares a run) and payroll:approve (the checker who approves it) is deliberate separation of duties — ideally two different people.

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How statutory deductions work (read this once)

A common point of confusion: you do not enter the amount or formula for PAYE, NSSF or LST. These are statutory items. When you mark a salary component as statutory you simply tell the system which kind it is (PAYE / NSSF / LST), and the figures are computed at run time by the statutory engine using the income-tax slabs and the configured NSSF rates for the period. In the salary structure builder these appear as read-only “auto-calculated” pills — there is no amount box to fill in, and the system will reject any attempt to put one there. This keeps statutory maths consistent and audit-safe across every employee. See Salary components and Income-tax slabs for the detail.

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Behind the scenes — payroll and your books

Payroll is not just an HR activity; it moves real money and posts to the general ledger at two distinct moments:
  • When a run is submitted/approved, Hitaji 360 posts a salary accrual — it recognises the wage expense and the liabilities you now owe (net pay to employees, PAYE/NSSF/LST to the authorities).
  • When you record a payment, it posts the cash going out, clearing the net-pay liability.
The exact debits and credits are shown on Running payroll → Behind the scenes and Payslips. The headline shape is: