Pay Bill Preparation

1Purpose #

• Works out what one employee is paid for one payroll period, and records it as a voucher.
• The attendance grid is what they earned it for — days worked, overtime, leave, production, trips — with the rate each carries.
• The pay-head grid is what is added and taken off: allowances, PF, ESI, advances, loans, bonus.
• Saving the bill claims the attendance it paid for, so the same day's work can not be paid twice.

2Your first pay bill, step by step #

1. Press Add (F3) . Check the Voucher Type — it is fixed once saved.
2. Pick the Employee . One bill pays one employee, so this too is fixed after saving.
3. Set Period From and Period To — usually the calendar month you are paying.
4. Press Auto Load (F6) . The attendance summary and the pay scheme arrive, calculated.
5. Read the notes if any appear: they say what could not be worked out and why.
6. Check the summary strip — attendance value, earnings, deductions, net payment.
7. Adjust anything by hand. Typing over a calculated pay head overrides it for this bill only.
8. Press Save (F5) and confirm.

3How Auto Load works #

• Attendance is summarised per type across the period, and attendance a previous pay bill already consumed is left out — so re-running it never double-pays.
• Pay heads come from the employee's pay scheme as it stands on the period's END date. A head whose effective date is later, or which has expired, is not brought in.
• Order matters. Heads are calculated top to bottom, and a head can be worked out from the ones above it — that is how "PF is 12% of basic" and then "ESI is 1.75% of everything so far" both come out right. Their order is the order of the pay scheme.
• Slabs are applied before rounding: the first band the value falls into wins, and a band with no upper limit is open-ended. If no band matches, the head comes out zero — visible, rather than silently passing the raw value through.
• Employer contribution is worked out on its own basis, which may be the value of the head itself.
• Anything that could not be calculated is named in a note and left for you to key. Two kinds are not calculated here yet: heads driven by a formula, and the "Incentives From …" kinds, which read sales and item data the web port does not carry yet.

4Status, posting, documents and printing #

A pay bill is a voucher like any other, so these four work exactly as they do on the inventory screen — same rules, same permissions, same database routine.

• Change Status (F7) marks the bill Approved, Rejected, On Hold — whatever your company defines — with a remark. Only statuses your user is allowed to set on this voucher type are offered, and it needs the Approve right. A status is a marker for your workflow: it posts nothing and releases nothing.
• Mark Posted / Mark Unposted needs the voucher-posting right. Here it is not just a marker — see below.
• POSTING IS WHAT CLAIMS THE ATTENDANCE. The database links a bill to the attendance it paid for only while the bill is posted. Take the posted mark off and that attendance is released, so it can be paid on another bill. That is the one flag on this screen with a consequence behind it, and the confirmation says so.
• Documents (F8) attaches files from the document store — a signed pay sheet, a bank advice. It appears only where the Document Management module is licensed, and attachments are keyed exactly as the desktop keys them, so a file attached on either side is the same record.
• Print (Ctrl+P) prints the bill as a payslip: header block, the attendance lines with their totals, the pay heads with earnings, deductions and employer contribution, and the net payment. Company name and report head repeat on every sheet.
• Both statuses are changed by the same database routine the desktop calls, which checks the right itself — so a refusal here is the same refusal the desktop would give, in the same words.

5Notifications #

• Saving a pay bill sends its notification automatically , if the Voucher Manager has an e-mail option configured for the voucher type. Nothing configured, nothing sent.
• That send happens inside the same database operation as the save — the screen does not do it, which is why there is no Notify button and no post-save prompt here. The desktop behaves identically for the same voucher type, because it is literally the same code.
• Two events exist: one when the bill is first created and one when it is altered. Which of them notifies whom is configured in Voucher Manager, not on this screen.
• Every message that goes out is recorded in the Notification Log under Admin, with its recipient, its outcome and — when it failed — why.

6Field details #

• Voucher Type — the pay-bill book. Only types filed under group PAY in Voucher Manager appear.
• Voucher No — typed by you only when the book is numbered manually; otherwise the system allocates it on save.
• Voucher Date — the date of the bill itself, not the period. Slab expiry is judged against it.
• Employee — any ledger account flagged as an employee.
• Period From / To — the window Auto Load reads attendance over. The pay scheme is read at the TO date.
• Transaction Class — optional reporting grouping; changes no amount. Only the classes ticked for this voucher type in Voucher Manager are listed. Changing the voucher type clears a class that the new type does not offer, and says so. The ＋ footer creates a class without leaving the page, and also ticks it for the selected voucher type in Voucher Manager — a class created here is meant to be used here, so it stays in the list afterwards.
• Ref. No — your own reference. Compulsory when the voucher type says so.
• Division — shown only under the ERP licence with Track Division on.
• Quantity / Rate / Amount — amount is quantity × rate until you type an amount, after which yours stands.
• Rate and Amount greyed out — you may not change rates or amounts on this voucher type. That needs Allow Rate Edit on the voucher type in User Manager (Vouchers tab); an administrator may always, unless denied under Tools > Deny Rate / Amount column edit . Hover over the cell for the reason. The right is checked once, when the voucher type is loaded.
• Earning / Deduction — a pay head is one or the other, decided by its type in the Pay-Heads master, and only that column is editable.
• Employer Contribution — the employer's share where the head has one. It is not part of net payment.
• Net payment — the attendance total plus earnings minus deductions. The attendance value is what the employee earned, so it is part of the net; the employer's contribution is not. This is exactly the sum the database stores, so the screen and the saved voucher always agree.

7Shortcut keys #

• F2 Find · F3 Add · F4 Modify · F5 Save · F6 Auto Load · Esc Cancel.
• F7 Change Status · F8 Documents · Ctrl+P Print — all three act on the bill currently loaded, so they do nothing while one is being prepared.
• Two kinds of print. Print (Ctrl+P) prints what is on screen, with the company name and report head repeating on every sheet. Print Format (F9) renders the document design saved for this voucher type in Print Format — the same formats and the same picker the inventory screen uses. Pick a format and Print , or Download to keep the PDF. A format marked as a group prints every member format in priority order and stops on the first failure. Print Format needs the voucher saved first, and nothing is offered when no format is configured against the voucher type.
• Inside the Change Status dialog, F5 applies the status and Esc closes it. While it is open F5 belongs to the dialog, not to Save.
• Ctrl+Enter puts a new line inside Narration; plain Enter moves on.
• Keys belong to the focused copy of the page, so a second tab of this screen keeps its own.

8Why is a pick-list empty? #

• Voucher Type — no voucher type is filed under group PAY . An administrator creates one in Voucher Manager.
• Employee — ledger accounts exist but none is flagged as an employee. Set the flag in the Employee master; the ＋ footer creates one without leaving this page.
• Attendance type — the Attendance Type master is empty.
• Transaction Class — the list is not every class in the system. Voucher Manager holds a ticked list per voucher type, and only those are offered here. A short or empty list means few or none are ticked for the voucher type you picked — tick them against that voucher type in Voucher Manager. A voucher type with nothing ticked at all is treated as unrestricted and shows every class.
• Pay head — no ledger account is marked as a pay head. Mark one in the Ledger Account master, then define its rules in Pay-Heads.
• Division — the field is hidden unless the ERP licence and the Track Division setting are both on, and only divisions applicable to your branch are listed.
• Auto Load found nothing — most often the employee has no pay-template allocation effective in the period. That allocation, not the attendance alone, is what drives the summary.
• Auto Load skipped attendance that exists — only entries that are posted and not cancelled reach payroll; where the payroll setting Is Need Approval For Attendance/Leave/Production Entry to Prepare Payroll is on, they must also be Approved . Auto Load counts what it left out and says so, so post the entries and load again.

9Loans, advances and other scheduled items #

Auto Load adds these by itself. When a payment voucher gave an employee a loan or an advance and a recovery schedule was set against that line, the instalment appears on the bill as a pay head without anyone keying it. The same works the other way for a scheduled earning.

• One Time — taken once, ever.
• On Every Payroll — the amount every period, until the schedule expires.
• Installment — the amount, but never more than the ledger still owes, so a loan stops itself the period it is repaid and the last instalment is whatever is left.
• Never more than the bill is worth. A recovery is capped at what is left to pay the employee after everything else, and Auto Load's notes say when it was reduced or skipped for that reason — it is not silent.
• An unposted bill has not recovered anything. The count of what has already been taken ignores unposted bills, so unposting one makes its instalment fall due again — which is what correcting a mistake needs.

The schedule itself is set where the money was given: save the payment voucher, and the Scheduled Earnings & Deductions window opens for any line whose ledger is marked to recover through payroll. Needs the Payroll module.

10Rules and integrity #

• Blank rows are discarded on save. Both grids add an empty row as you tab off the last one, so a trailing blank is normal and is simply dropped. A row you started but did not finish still fails validation by row number.
• Status and posting come from Voucher Manager — a new bill starts in that voucher type's Default Status and Default Posting Status . The database applies this when the bill is written, so the saved bill is the authority.
• Everything wrong is reported at once , as a numbered checklist — never one error per save attempt.
• The period must run forwards : the end date may not precede the start.
• A bill needs something on it — at least one attendance line or one pay head.
• No type or head twice. The same attendance type, or the same pay head, may appear only once on a bill; merge the lines instead.
• A zero bill is refused unless your settings allow zero-valued vouchers.
• The voucher type's amount limit is enforced , and names your current limit when it stops you.
• Saving claims the attendance it paid for. Those attendance lines then refuse to be edited or deleted — which is what stops a day being paid twice.
• The claim holds only while the bill is POSTED. An unposted bill claims nothing, so its attendance is free to be paid on another bill. Marking a bill unposted therefore has a real consequence, not a cosmetic one.
• A bill created by another module — a settlement or a leave run — is read-only here and must be reversed where it came from.
• Numbering, the net-payment arithmetic, the posting to accounts and the voucher e-mail are all done by the database , in the same one operation the desktop uses. The screen does not re-do any of them, so both applications behave identically.

11If something does not work #