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A salary component is a single line that can appear on a payslip — one earning (basic pay, housing allowance, transport, a bonus) or one deduction (a loan repayment, a voluntary saving, income tax). You define each component once, give it a short abbreviation, and then reuse it across as many salary structures as you like. Think of components as the vocabulary of your payroll: structures are the sentences you build from them. Components come in three flavours: ordinary earnings, ordinary deductions, and statutory items (PAYE, NSSF, LST). The first two you control completely — a flat amount or a formula. Statutory items are different: you only declare what kind they are, and the system computes the figure at run time. This page covers all three. You’ll find this at: /settings/erp/finance/payroll-components
The old link /payroll/setup/components still works and redirects here.
📷 Screenshot: the Salary Components list with the “New Component” button — to be added.
Multi-business: components belong to the selected business. Check the business switcher before creating one.

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Earnings, deductions and statutory items

A component’s Type is either Earning or Deduction. Marking it Statutory on top of that tells the system the figure is owed to / withheld for the government and must be computed, not typed in.

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Creating a component

From the list, choose New Component. The form (the Salary Component modal) has these fields: Choose Create (or Save changes when editing). Click any row in the list to edit it.

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Flat amount vs formula

A non-statutory component can carry either a flat amount or a formula — never both. The flat amount is an optional default; in practice the real per-employee figure is usually set on the structure or assignment (see Salary structures). Turn on Calculate from a formula when the amount depends on other values.

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Component codes used in formulas

Formulas refer to other values by code. The built-in codes are: You can also reference any other non-statutory component by its abbreviation — for example BASIC * 0.4 or HRA + TRANSPORT. Formulas support arithmetic (+ - * / %), comparisons, &&/||/!, the ternary condition ? a : b, and the functions min, max, abs, round, floor, ceil. They cannot reference statutory components (those are computed afterwards).

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Statutory components are computed, not entered

This is the most important rule on the page. When Statutory is on, the system rejects any attempt to give the component a fixed amount, a formula, a “calculate from formula” flag, or a condition. You declare only the kind (PAYE, NSSF, LST), and the actual figure is produced at run time by the statutory engine using:
  • the income-tax slabs in effect for the period (for PAYE — see Income-tax slabs), and
  • the configured NSSF / LST rates for the business.
If you try to save a statutory component with an inline amount or formula you’ll see an error like “Statutory salary components must not carry an inline amount, formula, condition… they are driven by the statutory registry.” That is by design. The statutory kinds map to dedicated payable accounts in your books:
Once a component is created as statutory you cannot later change its kind or turn it back into an ordinary component — set it inactive instead.

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Editing and removing

  • Edit: click a row. Most fields can be changed; the statutory kind is locked after creation.
  • Delete: a component can only be deleted if no active salary structure still references it, and statutory components can’t be deleted at all. The clean way to retire a component is to switch Active off — it then stays in history but is skipped on new runs.

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Permissions

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Behind the scenes — the accounting

Each component can be mapped to a GL account per business (the account it debits or credits when payroll posts). Earnings debit a salary/expense account; deductions credit a liability or asset account; statutory items credit their dedicated payable. If a component has no explicit mapping, the run falls back to a blanket payroll-expenses account (for earnings) or salary-payable (for deductions). The full posting is shown on Running payroll → Behind the scenes.