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Payroll and payslips

Define free-form salary structures with earning and deduction components, set a base currency, run payroll for a month, and generate downloadable payslips for every employee.

9 min read · Reviewed 2026-07-13

Clyentra's payroll is a calculator you define, not a tax engine you inherit. You describe someone's pay as a list of components — some add, some subtract — and Clyentra does the arithmetic, applies attendance, and produces a payslip. Understanding that one design decision makes everything else in this article obvious.

There is no built-in statutory tax engine: Clyentra does not compute income tax withholding, social insurance, or pension contributions for any jurisdiction. It has no tax tables and it does not file anything on your behalf. What it does is apply exactly the components you define. If a deduction should be on a payslip, you put it there — as a component with an amount. Read this paragraph twice before you run your first payroll.

The two views

Open /hr/hr-payroll. The screen is titled Payroll — "View your salary details and check payslips" — and what you see depends on who you are.

Admins get one extra thing: a Run Payroll button in the header. It takes you to HR configurations, on the payroll tab — which is where the machinery actually lives.

The salary structure model, in full

A salary structure is assigned to one employee, is effective from a date, and holds a list of components. Every component has exactly four properties:

That is the entire model. There are no formulas, no percentages-of-other-components, no jurisdiction rules hiding behind it. Earnings are summed, deductions are summed, and net pay is the difference. If you can express someone's pay as a list of names and amounts, Clyentra can pay it.

A worked example

For a team in Portland, Toronto or Berlin, a structure might look like this:

Earnings total 7,000. Deductions total 2,200. Net pay is 4,800. Those numbers are yours — the tax withholding figure came from your payroll provider or your accountant, not from Clyentra.

Assign a structure

In HR configurations, the Salary structures tab — "Manage employee compensation plans and component breakdowns" — lists your employees down the left. Press Assign structure.

1. Select Employee. Search by name or code. A structure belongs to exactly one person.
2. Set Effective From. When this compensation starts. Effective To (Optional) is what you set when it ends — leave it empty and the structure is the active one.
3. Set the Base Currency. It defaults to your organization's currency — USD, CAD, EUR, GBP. Every amount in this structure is denominated in it.
4. Build the components. Press Add Component for each one. Fill in Name (the Code auto-fills from it), Amount, and Component Type — Earning (+) or Deduction (-). The accordion header previews each component as + 6,000 USD or - 300 USD, so you can see the sign at a glance.
5. Press Create structure. A component with no name or no code is dropped silently on save — fill both in, or it will not exist.

Each structure carries its own currency: Base Currency is set per structure, not per organization. A team spread across the US, Canada and Germany can hold USD, CAD and EUR structures side by side, and each payslip is denominated in the currency of the structure that produced it.

Reading the structure panel

Select an employee and you get two things worth knowing about.

The Active net pay card shows earnings minus deductions for the structure currently in force, with a bar splitting the two and separate Earnings and Deductions totals underneath. It is the number the employee actually receives, and it is the one to sanity-check before you run anything.

Compensation history is a timeline of every structure that person has ever had, newest at the top, each badged Active or Archived. Expand any entry with View components breakdown and you see exactly what that structure paid — every component, with its code and its signed amount.

Raises are new structures, not edits: To give someone a raise, set Effective To on the current structure and assign a new one starting the next day. Do not overwrite the amounts on the old structure — if you do, you destroy the record of what they used to earn, and Compensation history becomes a history of nothing.

Run payroll

In HR configurations, the Payroll tab — "Create, process, and review payroll periods" — is where a month becomes money.

1. Press New run. The form is headed New payroll run.
2. Set the period. A Month (1–12) and a Year. Add Notes if you need to — the placeholder reads "Optional payroll notes" — and it is where you record why this run was unusual.
3. Press Create payroll run. The run is created as a draft. Nothing has been calculated yet, and nothing has been sent.
4. Press Process. The Process button appears on a draft run and only on a draft run. This is the step that does the work.

A run has three statuses: draft → processing → completed. When it completes, a payslip exists for every employee in the run, and the run's detail panel lists them under Employee payslips with each person's working days, days present, leave taken, gross, deductions and net.

Draft is your only chance to look: A run sits in draft until you press Process, and that gap is the review window. Once it is completed, payslips exist and people can see them. Check the Active net pay on your structures and the attendance figures for the month before you process, not after.

Attendance feeds payroll

Every payslip carries total working days, days present and leave taken. Clyentra pulls those from the attendance and leave records for the period — which means a month of missing check-ins produces a payslip somebody argues with.

Chase the regularization requests and the pending leave approvals before you process the run. Fixing attendance after a payslip exists is a much longer conversation. See attendance-and-leave.

The payslip

On My Payslips, every completed run you were part of appears in the left rail as a period — March 2026, with its net pay beside it. Select one and the payslip opens.

It shows the period and when it was processed, the attendance block (total working days, days present, leave taken), and the money: total earnings (gross), total deductions, and net take-home. Press Download Payslip and Clyentra generates a PDF — the document you send to a landlord or a bank, with the amount rendered in words as well as figures. The button confirms with Downloaded when it lands.

The Salary Structure tab shows the same employee their current structure: gross monthly payout, then Earnings and Deductions side by side, each component with its name, its code and its amount, and a total for each column.

When an employee sees nothing

Two empty states, two different causes:

The order that works: Employees exist → attendance and leave are clean for the period → every employee has an active salary structure → create the run → check it while it is a draft → Process. Skip a step and you will find out which one you skipped from the person whose payslip is wrong.