Monthly payroll runs

How it works

1. Enable Payroll v2 once for the company, and make sure every employee to be paid has an active salary structure.
2. Finalize the month in Attendance so payroll reads frozen paid days. A banner on a draft run says whether that attendance month is finalized.
3. Create a new payroll run with the month, the year and the type: Regular, Off-cycle or Bonus.
4. ZeniaHR computes a line per employee with paid days, gross, PF, ESI, professional tax, net pay and employer cost. People who joined after the month or left before it are listed as left out, with the reason.
5. Fix any attendance or input issue and press Recompute. The draft keeps its number and refreshes every line.
6. Press Finalize and seal. The run gets its seal, becomes read-only and marks that month's pending inputs as applied.
7. If a mistake surfaces later, cancel the run, which stays on record for audit and releases its inputs, then create a fresh one.

What you can set

• Run types: Regular, Off-cycle and Bonus.
• One regular run per month; a second one for the same month is refused until the first is cancelled.
• Draft actions: Recompute, Finalize and seal, and Delete draft.
• Finalized actions: Create payment batch and Cancel run.
• Run totals: employees, gross, deductions, net payable and employer cost.
• Finalize permission: with Access Control enforcement on, only roles given the finalize action can seal a run.
• Paid days per line from the finalized attendance month, always bounded by joining and exit dates.

Why a sealed run matters

In many companies the payroll sheet keeps changing after salaries are paid: a formula is fixed, a row is edited, and three months later nobody can say which version the bank transfer used. A sealed run ends that. The digest is computed from each line's employee, gross, deductions, net pay and employer cost, and the run cannot be edited afterwards. Corrections happen in the open, by cancelling and rerunning, so the record shows both the mistake and the fix.

Worked example: the September 2026 run

A food processing company in Nashik has 42 employees with salary structures. HR finalizes September attendance on 2 October and creates the regular run for September. The draft has 40 lines. Two people are listed as left out: Tanvi, whose join date of 5 October is after the period, and Ganesh, whose exit date of 31 August is before it.

Pradeep, a packing supervisor on a gross of ₹24,000, shows 29 of 30 paid days after one unpaid absence, so his earned gross is ₹23,200, at ₹800 a day. HR then notices that Anjali's ₹1,500 sales incentive is missing, adds it as an input for September and presses Recompute. On 4 October Finance checks the totals and finalizes the run, leaving time to pay before the 7th.

A payroll calendar that meets the deadline

Monthly wages must be paid by the 7th of the following month, so work backwards from that date. Close attendance corrections by the 2nd, finalize the attendance month, collect inputs by the 3rd, review the draft on the 4th and finalize by the 5th, leaving two days for the bank. Put these dates in your compliance calendar and read the wage payment timelines for exits, where wages are due within two working days.

Frequently asked questions