HR & Core Payroll

5. Payroll Foundations — Frequencies, Periods, Components and Structures

The core payroll engine is built from four configurable building blocks that must be in place before any pay run can execute.

Pay Frequencies (PayFrequenciesPage) define how often employees are paid, and Payroll Periods (PayrollPeriodsPage) materialise those frequencies into the concrete windows a run covers.

Salary Components (SalaryComponentsPage) are the individual earnings and deductions — the named pieces that add up to gross and net pay. Salary Structures (SalaryStructuresPage) assemble components into an assignable package. A structure can enforce minimum and maximum bounds on its values, constraining what a given assignment may pay.

Importantly, the engine has a defined fallback: when an employee has no salary structure assigned, the system uses a monthly base salary instead. This means payroll can still run for employees who have not yet been placed on a formal structure, rather than failing outright, while structured employees get the richer component-level treatment.

These foundations are deliberately separated from the run itself. Because components and structures are reusable reference data, an organisation defines its compensation model once and then applies it across many periods and many employees. Salary templates extend this further: templates can be listed and applied, letting an organisation stamp a standard structure onto employees quickly. The same component and structure data later feeds the country-specific statutory previews, which read earnings in order to compute tax and social-insurance figures.