HR: Off-Cycle Pay, Final Settlement, Loans & Workforce Planning

A regular payroll run is one per period and work country, and it pays everyone. An off-cycle run pays chosen employees something extra in the same month — a bonus, a correction, missed pay, a commission — without touching the regular run. Open Human Resources → Payroll → New Payroll Run and choose the Off-cycle tab. You pick a reason (Bonus, Correction, Missed pay, Commission or Other), the period, the work country and the standard working days, add notes if you wish, and choose Create Run. The run starts empty: nobody is paid until you add an amount for them.

On the run page, the Amounts on this run card lists what you have entered, and the form beneath it adds one line at a time: the employee, Pay or recover (Pay as an earning, or Recover as a deduction such as an overpayment), the kind of pay (Bonus, Commission, Arrears / missed pay, Correction, One-off allowance or Other earning), a description, the amount, and two switches — Taxable and Pensionable. Amounts can be added and removed while the run is a draft or calculated. From there the run follows the same lifecycle as a regular one: calculate, approve, post, after which it is locked and each net payment appears in the Payments Register. A run that was never approved can be discarded from its Related menu, which deletes its payslips and amounts.

In practice: a Nairobi logistics company pays its regular October run on the 25th. On the 30th the board approves a Q3 performance bonus for six drivers. Payroll opens an off-cycle run for October, reason Bonus, and adds six Bonus lines, each Taxable and not Pensionable, with the description “Q3 performance bonus”. A seventh line recovers KES 4,000 overpaid to one driver in September, entered as Recover. The finance manager approves, payroll posts, and the seven payments sit in the Payments Register next to the regular run’s — without anyone reopening the run that was already paid.

Income-tax bands, personal relief and the caps on social-security and health contributions are monthly figures. If each run were taxed on its own, a bonus paid in a second run would start again from the lowest band and take relief a second time, and the month would be under-taxed. So AWRA taxes each payslip on the month’s combined approved and paid pay for that employee, minus what that month’s other payslips have already deducted. Bands, relief and caps therefore apply once per month, however many runs the employee appears in.

Two consequences follow. First, an off-cycle payslip usually shows more tax than the bonus would attract on its own, because it is stacked on top of the regular salary that has already used the lower bands; that is correct, not an error. Second, a later run never refunds tax: if a correction reduces a month’s pay, the later payslip shows no negative tax, and the difference is for HR and your payroll adviser to settle. A run counts toward the month only once it is approved or paid, so the order in which runs are approved matters to which payslip carries which part of the tax.

The month is also merged on the way out. The Kenya filing files on a run — the P10 PAYE return, the NSSF return and the SHIF schedule — and the employee’s P9 certificate combine each employee’s payslips for the month into one row, which is how the authorities expect to see them. AWRA produces these files ready for upload; your organization uploads them to each authority’s portal and makes the payments itself. In practice: a Kisumu school pays a teacher her regular salary on the 24th and a marking allowance in an off-cycle run on the 29th. The second payslip’s PAYE is worked out on salary plus allowance, minus the PAYE already on the first, and October’s P10 shows her once, with the combined figures.

A final settlement is a leaver’s last pay, run as its own payroll run. Start it from the employee’s profile, where the Loans & Final Pay card has a Prepare Final Settlement button (it needs the permission to run payroll and a work country on the profile), or from Human Resources → Payroll → New Payroll Run on the Final settlement tab. Choose the leaving employee, confirm the last working day — filled in from their end date when one is set — and the standard working days, which set the daily rate. Continue to figures opens the settlement form.

The form proposes every figure from the records. Salary to the last working day counts the working days from the start of the month to the last day on your working calendar, at basic salary ÷ standard working days; if a regular run already paid this person for the month, no further salary is proposed. Unused leave encashed lists each paid leave type with the remaining balance for the leaving year, and you tick the types to encash and the days. Notice pay in lieu is a number of days at the daily rate, or an amount you type instead. Gratuity, severance and an other earning are amounts you enter. Every figure can be changed before you save.

In practice: a Dar es Salaam NGO’s programme officer leaves on 17 October with 6.5 days of annual leave left. The form proposes 13 working days of salary, 6.5 days of leave at the daily rate, and nothing for notice, because she worked her notice. HR enters a gratuity under her contract terms and checks with the NGO’s payroll adviser whether it is taxable before saving. If the employee had no contract on file, the daily rate would be zero, the form would say so, and HR would type the amounts directly.

The last section of the settlement form, Recover what is owed, lists the leaver’s open employee loans with their outstanding balances and their issued staff advances from accounting. HR ticks which to recover. Ticked balances come off the final pay, never taking it below zero, and loans and advances are recovered separately because they are different things in the books. A recovered staff advance is retired as cash returned when the run is posted; where your organization approves advance retirements, finance approves it like any other.

Every earning on the form has a Taxable switch, and it starts ticked. AWRA applies no automatic country-specific relief to severance or gratuity, because the rules differ by country and by the reason for leaving — HR decides the treatment of each item, ideally with the payroll adviser. Save and Calculate then runs the settlement through the same statutory engine as any payroll, taxed on the month’s combined pay as the previous lesson explained, and it is approved and posted like any other run. The settlement figures card on the run shows each line, and the employee profile then shows the settlement and its status.

In practice: a Kampala retailer’s store supervisor resigns with an employee loan balance of UGX 900,000 and an unretired travel advance of UGX 150,000. HR ticks both. Her final pay before recoveries is UGX 2.4 million, so both come off in full. Had her final pay been only UGX 700,000, the loan recovery would have stopped at what the pay allowed rather than producing a negative payslip, and the rest of the loan would stay open for HR to recover by hand or write off.

Employee loans live under Human Resources → Payroll → Employee Loans, and a profile’s Loans & Final Pay card has a Loan button that opens the form for that person. Issue Employee Loan asks for the employee, the principal, an optional flat interest rate (charged once on the principal and added to what is repaid; leave it at 0 for an interest-free loan), either an instalment amount or a number of instalments, the issue date, the month of the first deduction, a purpose and notes. A tick box records the payout in the ledger — Staff Loans receivable from Bank, with any interest to Staff Loan Interest income — and you untick it for a loan paid out before it was recorded in AWRA.

From the first-deduction month, every regular payroll run deducts the instalment, never more than the remaining balance and never more than the employee’s remaining net pay, and the repayment is recorded when that run is posted. The loan page shows the schedule by payroll month and a repayment ledger linking each deduction to its run. People allowed to manage loans can Pause a loan (payroll skips it) and Resume it, Record a Repayment made in cash or by transfer, and Write Off the balance with a reason. Reading loans needs the permission to view payroll; changing them needs the permission to manage employee loans.

The employee sees their own loans — instalment, repaid and balance — in a My Loans card on My Payslips, on the web and in the mobile app, and is notified in the bell and by email when a loan is issued and when it is fully repaid. In practice: a Mombasa hotel lends a chef KES 60,000 interest-free over 6 instalments from November. In December he is on unpaid leave and his net pay is only KES 6,000, so payroll deducts 6,000 rather than 10,000 and the schedule runs a month longer. In February HR pauses the loan for his child’s school fees month and resumes it in March.

The headcount plan compares the seats you intend to fill with the people in them. Open it from Human Resources → Positions (Related menu → Headcount plan). It is kept per year — this year and next are offered — and each line is a position, optionally for one department, with a planned headcount and a monthly budgeted cost per head. The table shows Planned, Filled, In recruitment, Variance, Cost / head, Budget / month and Actual / month, grouped by department, with a status of On plan, under, over, or Not in plan for positions people hold that have no plan line.

The counts are defined precisely. Filled counts employees in the position who are active, on probation or suspended. In recruitment counts unfilled openings on draft, open and on-hold vacancies. Actual cost is each person’s monthly basic salary plus allowances and benefits from their active contract, in your base currency only — anyone without an active contract in that currency is not costed and the page says how many. Where a position is under plan, a Requisition button opens a new vacancy already filled in with the position, department and number of openings; it needs the permission to manage recruitment. Changing the plan needs the permission to manage the headcount plan; viewing it needs the permission to view employees. The mobile app shows the plan read-only.

In practice: a Lusaka microfinance company plans 12 Loan Officers for next year at ZMW 9,500 per head. The plan shows 9 filled and 1 in recruitment, so the variance is 2 under, and budget per month is ZMW 114,000 against an actual of ZMW 83,100. HR clicks Requisition 2 and a vacancy opens with two openings for Loan Officer in Credit. Two drivers appear as Not in plan; HR adds a plan line for Driver rather than leaving them uncosted in the totals.

Human Resources → Overview has an Expiring soon link that opens one list of everything in HR that runs out on a date: active contracts ending, employees still on probation, employment end dates, and employee or contract documents carrying an expiry date. Each row shows the employee, what is ending, the date and how far away it is, with filters for the type and for Already past or Coming up. The row’s button goes straight to the fix — Renew or extend for a contract, Confirm or extend for a probation, Renew contract for an employment end date, Replace document for a document.

Alerts go to HR and the employee’s line manager at 60, 30, 14 and 7 days before the date and on the day — once each, not daily — in the bell and by email. The look-ahead is set under HR settings → Expiry alerts, from 7 to 180 days (blank means 60); with a shorter window the first alert simply comes later. Each channel can be switched off in Notification Preferences under HR documents. Statutory ID numbers carry no expiry date, so they are not part of this list.

A contract is never expired automatically, on purpose: payroll pays from the active contract, so flipping it silently could stop someone’s pay. A contract whose end date has passed stays active, appears as Already past, and gets a Mark expired button for anyone allowed to edit employees — or HR renews it in one click from the same row. In practice: a Nakuru flower farm has 40 seasonal contracts ending on 31 December. HR sees them at 60 days, renews 32 from the list in November, and on 2 January marks the remaining 8 expired, which tells payroll to stop treating them as current. The mobile app shows the same list read-only.