Payroll & tax.

A wrong payslip is expensive twice — once in the correction, and once in the trust it costs. YESS payroll is built to keep both costs low: it computes pay from records the school already keeps (the contract, the logbook, attendance, leave, the conduct register), shows the result line by line, and gives the staff member a chance to challenge a figure before the money moves.

The payroll hub lives at /dashboard/payroll. It is organised around the run — one payroll cycle for one group of staff in one month — and everything in this handbook hangs off that single object: the calculation, the preview, the disputes, the approval, and the payment.

A payroll run moves through three deliberate actions: Draft → (Auto Calculate) → Preview → (Approve Payroll) → Approved → (Mark Paid) → Processed. A run can also be Cancelled. Each transition has a named actor behind it, so the run carries its own audit trail — who prepared it, who approved it, and who executed the payment.

Draft. You open a run for a month and a pay group. Clicking Auto Calculate runs the engine across every member of the group, writes a payslip for each, and moves the run straight to Preview. Immediately after the calculation, the school's auto-applied conduct and infringement rules are layered onto the slips as penalty lines.

Preview. While a run sits here, each staff member can open their pre-payslip and either acknowledge it or raise a revendication — the dispute flow in Chapter three. Approve Payroll locks the figures once the review window closes; Mark Paid records who executed the payment and when, and moves the run to Processed — its terminal state.

Every payslip is a small ledger with three blocks. The engine draws on six inputs to build it: the base salary from the contract (for salaried and hybrid staff), logbook-gated hours pay (for hourly and hybrid staff), approved bonuses, attendance deductions for unjustified absence and unpaid leave, conduct and infringement penalties applied by the school's rules, and statutory deductions. The slip schema also itemises allowances, substitution pay, and period-level lines (early departure, missed periods) which fill in where the data exists.

The earnings block lists base salary, allowances, bonuses, substitution pay, and extra hours such as invigilation. The deductions block lists the absence deduction, the lateness deduction, penalty deductions from conduct rules (itemised by rule), early-departure and missed-period deductions, and statutory contributions — each statutory line marked with an asterisk so it is unmistakable. The summary resolves the three into gross pay, total deductions, and net pay.

Statutory deductions are configured through a tax pack — a named set of components (income tax, social security, pension, health, a training levy, or other) the school assigns once, or a flat income-tax rate (15% by default) where no pack is set. YESS ships starter templates for several jurisdictions — Cameroon CNPS, Senegal IPRES/CSS, Côte d'Ivoire CNPS, RDC INSS — each to be confirmed with your accountant.

The slip also shows the attendance picture behind the numbers: days worked versus expected, unjustified absences, the late count, and paid hours — marked verified when there is real clock data and estimated when there is not — plus periods taught and missed. A slip can carry a pay-blocked flag with a reason, so a single problem holds one person's payment (an “On hold” badge on their slip) without stopping the whole run.

Pay should never be a surprise. While a run sits in Preview, every staff member sees their pre-payslip at /teacher/my-payslip — the full ledger of what would land, badged Draft — preview. The window stays open for the number of days the school configures (seven by default). Each person opens it, checks the figures, and either acknowledges the slip or raises a revendication.

A revendication is a formal claim against one figure. The staff member picks the type — hours, absence, late, deduction, bonus, or other — gives a summary, a description, and (optionally) the value they believe is correct against the value the system recorded. The claim opens in the payroll office's Disputes queue and moves through Open → Under review → Resolved (accepted or rejected), or is withdrawn. If accepted, the office corrects the slip; either way the staff member gets an answer with a resolution note, and the whole exchange is recorded against the run.

Not everyone is paid on the same rhythm. A pay group captures one — a name, a frequency, and a pay-day rule — and every staff member belongs to one. Manage them at /dashboard/payroll/pay-groups. The frequency can be weekly, biweekly, monthly, termly, semesterly, or per-course; the pay-day rule can be a day of the month (the 25th), the last working day, a specific date, or an nth weekday (the last Friday). An optional offset advances or delays the actual payment by a few days.

Every school has one default group, named All staff and materialised automatically the first time you need it, so payroll works before you configure a thing. When you open a run you pick the group, and only its members are computed, on its calendar. The upcoming pay-date preview reads from the rule, so the office — and the owner — can see who gets paid next and when, without holding it in their head.

Two checks stand between a calculated run and a paid one.

The logbook-compliance gate. Teaching pay should follow teaching that was actually logged. The compliance view at /dashboard/payroll-compliance compares each teacher's expected logbook entries against their actual entries for the month, computes a completion percentage, and marks anyone below 80% non-compliant. A non-compliant teacher's pay is blocked at release until either the logbook is completed or a manager records an Override with a written reason — which is itself logged. This gate is enforced at the database when a run is marked paid.

The salary-budget panel. On the run, a panel compares the salary budget, the amount already released this year, and the cost of this run, then shows the headroom after it would settle. A run that would break the salary budget turns the panel red. By default this is awareness, not a hard stop — the office can still release. A school can switch on salary-budget enforcement, after which the database blocks an over-budget release until a manager records a reasoned override.

Every staff member — teaching or non-teaching — has their own payslip surface at /teacher/my-payslip (leadership roles reach the same screen from the dashboard). The header shows the four numbers they care about: total payslips, how many are to review, how many revendications are still open, and their year-to-date net (summed from processed slips only). Each slip carries a badge — Draft — preview while the run is open, or Final — paid once it is processed — and amounts are shown in the currency of the staff member's active contract.

During the preview window the slip is interactive: acknowledge it, or raise a revendication from a short dialog (type, a summary, the value you believe is correct, and the detail). After payment it is a permanent record. A My revendications section lists every claim the person has filed, with its status and the resolution note when it closes — so a question raised in March is still answerable in November.

Payroll is fed by the people-side of the school and bounded by its money-side.