Payroll: From Salary Template to a Paid Pay Run
A walkthrough of the Payroll app: pay schedules, salary templates, employees and contracts, pay runs with approval, loans, tax tables, W-2s and reports.
Yantra Team3 min read
On this page
Payroll is mostly setup. Once the pay schedule, the salary structure and the people are right, a pay run is a few clicks. The Payroll app walks you through that setup in order, then gets out of the way.
Open it
Pick Payroll in the apps launcher, or ask "summarize the next pay run". Payroll opens beside the chat and owns it while it is open. Home shows active employees, the next pay date, this period's net pay and how many runs are awaiting action, with a Process pay run button. Until your first run, it also shows a four-step Get set up list. Follow it top to bottom.
Set the schedule
In Settings, enter the organization name, address, currency and pay frequency: Monthly, Semi-monthly, Bi-weekly or Weekly. Pick a pay day between 1 and 28 and list your work locations.
Build the salary structure
Salary Components are the building blocks: earnings, deductions, reimbursements and benefits. Each one is a flat amount per month, a percentage of CTC, a percentage of Basic, or the remainder, and is marked taxable or not. A standard catalog seeds on first load.
Salary Templates turn an employee's annual CTC into a monthly split of earnings and deductions, with a Monthly preview so you can check the arithmetic before anyone is paid from it.
Add your people
On Employees, Add employee with a name, employee code, email, work location, date of joining, annual CTC and salary template. An employee can link a bank account through Plaid so salary has a verified destination.
If you already have a signed employment agreement, open Agreements and paste it. Payroll reads the wage, start date, hours and pay frequency, and shows the sentence each value came from. Reading writes nothing. Importing creates a contract, and activating it is off by default so a document never puts someone on payroll unchecked. Contracts are dated, so a raise is a new contract, not an edit.
Run payroll
On Pay Runs, Create pay run for a month and year, with an optional pay date. A payslip is generated for every active employee from their salary template. While the run is a draft, add one-time inputs per employee: Bonus, Overtime, Reimbursement, Adjustment (+), Adjustment (-) or Unpaid leave (days), then Recalculate.
The run then moves through Submit for approval, Approve or Reject, and Record payment. Open any payslip to see earnings, gross pay, deductions and net pay.
Loans and leave
Loans disburse a loan to an employee with a principal, a monthly EMI and an interest rate. The EMI is deducted in every pay run until the balance reaches zero, and you can pause or resume it. Under Work Entries, approved leave can be imported from the time tracker, so unpaid days reach the payslip without retyping.
Taxes, forms and reports
Taxes & Forms holds tax tables: progressive brackets on annual taxable income, a standard deduction, and who levies it (one national table, federal, a state, or a city or county). Type a state code and Read rates to pull the current income tax brackets, then Store them. Without an active table, income tax falls back to the flat component in the salary template.
Payroll also builds an employee copy of a W-2 from the year's payslips. It is not a filing, and it lists anything payroll could not fill in. Reports has a Payroll register for a period and Employee YTD totals.
From chat
- "Summarize the next pay run: who is in it and what it totals."
- "Help me set up an off-cycle payment for an employee."
- "Explain the tax withholdings on the latest pay run."
- "Add a new employee on the $85k engineer salary template."
What it is not
The hours behind a pay run come from Timer and Timesheet. Employee reimbursement claims belong in Expenses. Drafting an offer letter or employment contract is Contract Builder. Payroll tax law and salary benchmarks are answered in chat.