Company Setup & Settings

Settings → Company holds the identity of the employer. These values print on payslips and feed your statutory submissions, so accuracy matters more here than anywhere else.

Legal and trading name

The legal name must match your CIPC registration. The trading name is what employees see on their payslips.

Registration numbers

• Company registration number — CIPC, format YYYY/NNNNNN/07.
• PAYE reference — 10 digits, starts with 7. Required for EMP201 and IRP5.
• UIF reference — usually your PAYE number with a U prefix.
• SDL reference — usually your PAYE number with an L prefix. Only required if your annual payroll exceeds R500,000.
• COIDA registration — used for your Return of Earnings.

Address and contact

The physical and postal address print on statutory letters and employment verification documents. The payroll contact receives filing reminders and system alerts.

Statutory switches

If you are not registered for SDL, switch SDL off at company level. Individual employees can also be exempted — see the Employees module.

Logo and branding

Upload a logo under Settings → Branding. Payslip templates are deliberately neutral in colour so any company logo sits comfortably on the document.

Choosing frequencies

A company can run monthly, fortnightly and weekly payrolls simultaneously — common where salaried office staff and weekly-paid site staff work for the same employer.

The pay calendar

Each frequency generates a calendar of periods with a period start, period end, pay date and cut-off date. The pay date is what determines the tax month for SARS purposes.

Cut-off dates

Set a cut-off so managers know when timesheets, leave and claims must be in. After cut-off you can still capture — nothing is locked — but the dashboard flags late input.

Mid-year changes

If an employee moves from weekly to monthly, do not create a second employee record. Change the employee's frequency; their year-to-date figures follow them, which keeps PAYE and IRP5 correct.

Payroll items are the building blocks of every payslip. Get them right once and every future run is correct.

The four item types

• Earnings — basic salary, overtime, commission, allowances, bonuses.
• Deductions — employee-side amounts taken off pay (pension, medical aid, garnishee, loans).
• Fringe benefits — non-cash value taxed in the employee's hands (company car, free housing).
• Employer contributions — costs paid by the employer, shown for transparency but never deducted from the employee's pay (employer pension, employer medical aid, UIF employer, SDL).

Tax treatment

Each item carries flags: taxable or not, subject to UIF, subject to SDL, included in ETI remuneration, and how it behaves for annualisation. The SARS source code (for example 3601 income, 3701 travel allowance, 4001 pension) is attached here so IRP5 certificates build themselves at year-end.

Fixed, variable and calculated items

• Fixed — recurs every period at the same value until you change it.
• Variable — captured per run (overtime hours, commission).
• Calculated — a percentage of a base (for example 7.5% of pensionable salary), recalculated automatically when the salary changes.

Company-level versus employee-level

Define the item once at company level, then attach it to employees with their own values. Attaching an item to an employee is done on the employee's Payroll items tab.

A worked example

A pension fund at 7.5% employee and 7.5% employer on pensionable salary needs two items: a deduction (source code 4001) and an employer contribution (source code 4472, also creating a fringe benefit where applicable). Payroll Africa keeps them visually separated on the payslip so an employee never believes the employer portion was taken off their pay.

Why structure matters

Structure drives reporting. If you never assign cost centres, your cost-centre report will be empty and your accounting journal will post everything to one account.

Branches

Physical or legal sites. Useful for multi-site employers and for splitting UIF/COIDA reporting.

Departments

Functional grouping — Finance, Operations, Packhouse. Managers are assigned at department level for leave approval routing.

Cost centres

The accounting dimension. Every employee should carry a cost centre so payroll cost can be posted and analysed. Cost centres can be split — an employee can be 60% Production and 40% Admin.

Job grades and positions

Used for pay-band reporting, employment equity and organisational charts.

Choosing a template

Settings → Payslip template offers several designs. The Executive template is the flagship: a high-density, bank-ready layout with clearly separated deductions and employer contributions, a prominent net pay block, masked bank account numbers and a premium verification band.

Neutral colour palette

Templates use neutral cream and grey tones deliberately, so your logo — whatever its colours — never clashes with the document.

What appears on every payslip

Employer and employee identity, period and pay date, earnings, deductions, employer contributions, leave balances, year-to-date totals, net pay, banking (masked), the verification code and QR code, and a footer identifying Payroll Africa Technologies.

Dynamic length

Payslips grow to fit. An employee with 20 earning lines and 12 deductions produces a longer, correctly paginated document — no truncated labels, no overlapping sections.

Platform default

Super administrators can set a platform-wide default template that applies to new companies, while each company may still choose its own.