For Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea pays every fortnight. Our payroll table has a unique key on the month.

Salary and Wages Tax is computed on fortnightly tables, so the fortnight is the statutory unit rather than a scheduling preference — twenty-six of them in a year, against twelve months that do not divide into them. Twice a year a month therefore contains three pay days, and which two months depends on where your cycle starts. Our payroll run is stored as a seven-character month with a unique key on it, which means a second run inside one month is not missing from the roadmap: it is refused by the database. The line of code is below, and so is the year, worked through.

The subject: A unit of time rather than a tax. Salary and wages tax is computed on fortnightly tables — twenty-six pay periods a year against twelve months, which do not divide.
The limit: Our payroll table has a unique key on the month. One run per organization, per calendar month, per country of work — so a second run inside a month is refused by the database rather than missing from a backlog. The line of code is below.
Clearance and filing: The Internal Revenue Commission takes filings electronically and invoices are not cleared. There is no pipeline here to be connected to — which for once means the absence of an integration on our side is not a gap.
Withholding on business payments: Decided by whether your supplier holds a current Certificate of Compliance — somebody else's document, in date on the day you pay. We hold it and its expiry; we do not verify it and never will.

See the year, counted twice Talk to us about Papua New Guinea

The cycle, as arithmetic

One year, counted twice

Twenty-six pay days and twelve months, laid over each other. Every cell below is a calendar month and every mark in it is a pay day. Two cells have three marks, and no arrangement of a fortnightly cycle avoids that — it is what 26 against 12 means.

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Cycle starting Friday 2 January 2026 A worked year from one stated start date. Move the start by a week and the three-pay months move with it — which is the reason this page shows you a derivation instead of telling you they are January and July.

Pay days in the year: 26
Calendar months: 12
Months containing three pay days: 2
Payroll runs our schema will accept in a month: 1

The last two rows are the page. Two months a year need three pay runs and the database will accept one, and because 26 and 12 share a factor of two, the collision is not random — the clocks realign every six months, forever. This is not a scheduling inconvenience that a determined administrator works around. The tax on a fortnight is computed from a fortnightly table, and a month is not two fortnights.

Five questions for your own records

How many pay runs did your organization process last year — 12, 24, or 26?
In the months with three pay days, what did the third one get recorded as?
Is your salary and wages tax computed from a fortnightly table, or from a monthly figure divided?
When somebody joins or leaves mid-fortnight, which period does the part-payment belong to in your records?
If your system stores a payroll period as a month, where does the twenty-sixth pay day of the year live?

The limit, stated

The limit, stated as plainly as we can state it

One rule, and it is not a missing feature. It is a constraint that makes the feature impossible without rebuilding how a pay period is stored.

The rule, in two sentences

A pay period is stored as a calendar month. Not as a date range, not as a cycle — as a month.

One payroll run per organization, per month, per country of work. A second run in the same month is refused.

The second rule is the hard one: it is enforced at the point the record is created, so no setting and no workaround gets past it.

And the month is assumed four more times downstream

Timesheet periods

The same monthly period, one per employee per month.

Payroll refuses to calculate without a locked timesheet period, so the monthly assumption is enforced a second time on the same pay run — changing one place would not be enough.

The calculation itself

The period end is taken as the last calendar day of the month.

Every figure resolved as of period end — compensation in force, statutory rules in force — is resolved at a month boundary that a fortnightly cycle does not have.

Attendance and leave

Hours and unpaid leave are gathered from the first calendar day of the month.

The window the hours are read from is a month, so even a correctly split pay run would be reading the wrong span of days.

The run form

The period is entered as a year and a month, and validated as one.

There is no input that could express a fortnight even if everything below it could store one.

This is a structural limitation, and it is ours

Our payroll module runs one calculation per organization, per calendar month, per country of work. That is not a default that can be changed in settings and it is not a gap in a feature list — the period is a month, the month is baked into how the period start and end are computed, and a second run in the same month is refused outright. We measured this on 2026-08-10 by reading our own implementation rather than by reasoning about the product, and there is a test that pins the behaviour so that changing it has to be a deliberate act.

The consequence for a fortnightly market is total rather than partial. Twenty-six pay events cannot be recorded as twenty-six payroll runs, and the two months a year that need three cannot be recorded at all. There is no configuration that helps and no workaround we would recommend, because every workaround we can think of ends with a pay event recorded against the wrong period and a salary and wages tax computed from a monthly figure that the statutory table does not use. So we will say the plain thing: we are not your payroll system in Papua New Guinea today. What that is worth as a disclosure is that everything else on this page is measured to the same standard.

What this costs today

Four consequences, and none of them fail on the day they happen

Each of these is a record in the wrong period or a decision made without a document that existed. Nothing errors, nothing refuses, and the difference is found much later by somebody reconstructing a year.

A twenty-sixth pay day with nowhere to go

Twice a year the third pay day of a month arrives and the system has one slot for the month. It gets merged into the second run, or booked as an adjustment, or entered in a spreadsheet and journalled in — and from that moment the payroll ledger and the bank no longer describe the same events.

Tax computed on the wrong unit

Salary and wages tax comes from a fortnightly table. Derive it from a monthly gross and the progressive steps land in different places, which is not a rounding difference — it is a different figure, in a direction that depends on the employee. It reconciles at the year only if somebody reconciles it.

A supplier certificate nobody is watching

What you must withhold from a business payment turns on whether the payee holds a current Certificate of Compliance. The certificate has an expiry date, it lives in an email or a folder, and nothing joins it to the payment run. The deduction is therefore correct until the day it silently is not.

Cost that arrives long after the goods

Freight to a coastal port, coastal shipping, road haulage inland, handling at each transfer — invoiced separately and weeks apart. If the receipt closed when the goods arrived, none of it reaches the unit cost, and the margin on a job is calculated from a number that was never the cost.

Operations in Papua New Guinea

Four hand-offs between the ship and the shelf, and a cost that goes missing at each one.

Almost everything arrives through a chain rather than a journey: freight to a coastal port, coastal shipping, road haulage inland, and handling at every transfer between them. Each hand-off is a change of custody, and each change is somewhere a quantity or a cost can quietly stop being tracked. By the time the goods are on a shelf they have been in several parties' hands, and the invoices for all of it are still weeks away.

Inventory

Multi-site stock, including stock you do not hold

Goods sitting with a shipping agent, a haulier or a third-party store are still yours and still countable. A system that can only model places you operate turns every hand-off into a gap.

Stock transfers

Each leg confirmed by the party that received it

A transfer stays open until the receiving end confirms what arrived, so a shortage belongs to the leg it happened on. With four legs, attributing a loss to the whole journey is the same as not attributing it.

Landed cost

A receipt that stays open for the whole chain

Freight, coastal shipping, inland haulage and handling at each transfer arrive as separate invoices long after the goods. The receipt stays open so every one of them reaches the unit cost rather than an overhead line.

Suppliers

Supplier documents with dates the system watches

Certificates and registrations held against the supplier with their expiry tracked, so a lapse is surfaced by the system rather than noticed by whoever happens to remember. What a lapse means for you is your adviser's question; that it happened is ours.

Projects

Cost coded to a job as it is entered

Materials, expenses, plant and labour attributed at the point of capture, so a job's position exists while it is running rather than being assembled once it has finished.

Payments

A register that knows what it settled

Money out in one place with the supporting document attached and partial settlement held as partial — which matters across a chain where several parties invoice for parts of one consignment.

Two of this page's most useful findings are deliberately absent from this section: a fortnightly tax table derived from a monthly figure, and a unique key on the month that breaks on the twenty-sixth pay day of a year. Both are real, both are ours, and both are about a computation rather than an operation — they are set out plainly in the honesty ledger and the answers below, which is where a reader can weigh them.

Scope, in three parts rather than two

What runs today, what we would build, and where we stop on purpose

Three columns, because "no" means two entirely different things and one list hides which is which. The middle column is work that has not been done and has a price. The right-hand column is work we would decline from a paying customer — and it is the one to demand from every other vendor on your list, because a page without it has not told you where its edges are. The first item in the middle is a constraint in our own database rather than a missing feature.

Scope in Papua New Guinea, starting with the pay cycle

Running in the product today

Landed cost on the consignment, open after receipt, so a carrier or handling invoice arriving three weeks later still reaches the goods and the unit cost moves.
Multi-site stock with confirmed transfers and counts, including goods in transit between two of your own locations and stock held at a place you do not own.
A payment register covering transfers, cash and card settlements, with the invoices each payment clears — the level at which a payment-time deduction can actually be answered.
Supplier and transaction documents with their dates, previewable in place and retrievable by the transaction rather than by whoever filed them.
Cost coded to project, site, cost centre and customer at entry, which is what turns a per-contract report into a filter rather than a reconstruction.
Procurement approvals that refuse rather than warn above a threshold, with the full trail of who authorised what against which budget.
Original currency and the rate actually applied retained on every transaction, alongside the kina figures.

On the roadmap — and commissionable now

A fortnightly payroll run, which is a data-model change rather than a backlog item. Our payroll run is one calculation per organization, per calendar month, per country of work, enforced by a unique constraint on the table and assumed again in four places downstream. Papua New Guinea pays twenty-six times a year and twice a year a month needs three runs. This carries real weight — the timesheet lock, the period-end resolution and the attendance window all move with it — and it is first on the roadmap in this market, ahead of anything else here. Measured, quoted from the migration on the page above, and pinned by a test so that changing it has to be deliberate.
A Papua New Guinean payroll engine. Salary and wages tax tables, superannuation calculation, training levy and filing. What we do is attribute labour cost to projects, sites and cost centres — the reporting half rather than the calculation half. Our maintained statutory payroll engine covers Kenya only, which is simultaneously the limit and the evidence that a second one is buildable.
An expiry-dated compliance status on the supplier record, so that it can drive a deduction. We can hold a certificate as a document against the supplier today. The build makes it a status a payment run reads, so that a payment to a supplier whose certificate lapsed last week is flagged before it goes rather than found afterwards. That is a field, a date and a rule at payment time — small, specifiable and genuinely useful, and nobody has commissioned it yet.
An IRC output. A return, a schedule and a remittance file in the formats the Commission accepts are all part of it. Today nothing here is cleared or transmitted, and no application has been made.
Support inside your working day. We are in Nairobi at UTC+3 and you are at UTC+10, so our morning is your afternoon and the overlap is about three hours. Extending cover is a staffing decision rather than an engineering one, and it is quotable like any other — but today it is a real cost of buying from us and you should price it in.

Where we point you to a specialist — and this column is the reason to believe the other two

We will not tell you whether a supplier's Certificate of Compliance is valid. That is the Internal Revenue Commission's determination and the supplier's document. We can hold it, hold its expiry date and put it in front of you before you pay. A vendor offering to verify compliance status is describing a check they do not perform, and the day it is wrong the liability is yours rather than theirs.
We do not file, in any country whose rules we do not maintain. Kenya is the single exception, and it is one we earned by building and maintaining it rather than by claiming it. Ask any vendor who offers to file your PNG returns which of their customers has filed one, by name.
We will not characterise a landowner, provincial or state agreement. Resource operations here carry obligations that are negotiated rather than uniform, and we have not read yours. We hold the costs and the evidence against the project they belong to; what the agreement requires is a question for the people who signed it.
We have no influence over foreign currency availability and will not imply otherwise. A system can show you what is committed, in which currency, and how long settlements have actually been taking. It cannot move you up a queue, and any software pitch that suggests it can is selling you something that does not exist. The longer version of this argument is on our Malawi page and it applies here unchanged.
We will not claim a local presence. No office in Papua New Guinea, no implementation partner, no consultant who has been to your site. Remote from Nairobi, in English. We would rather write that sentence than let you infer a bench that is not there.

Every item in the middle column is buildable, and the first item is the one we would want to fix regardless of whether you buy. Kenya's eTIMS transmission and its maintained statutory payroll engine both exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared on its own. A fortnightly pay cycle is a bigger change than either, because it moves a unique key and four downstream assumptions rather than adding a feature beside them — which is exactly why we would rather tell you the size of it than discover it in month three. If the pay cycle, a PNG payroll engine, or supplier compliance dates at payment time is what stands between you and a decision, say which and we will scope it as a build: written specification, timeline and price, before you commit to anything. What we will not do is print a date on this page that nobody has paid for.

Read the three columns rather than counting them. The middle one is work, and work has a specification, a timeline and a price. The right-hand one is where we stop on purpose, and it is the column worth demanding from every other vendor on your list — a page without one has simply not told you where its edges are. One thing we have deliberately left off all three: language. English is an official language here and the language of business, so unlike our Francophone and Gulf pages there is nothing to disclose, and we are not going to pad the list to look thorough.

How this starts

Three moves, and the first two need your own records rather than a vendor

Count last year's pay runs

Not the pay days — the runs your system recorded. If twenty-six pay events produced twenty-four records, you have found the subject of this page in your own data, and the two months where the arithmetic went is where the difference is hiding.

Take one supplier payment and find the certificate

Pick a business payment made last quarter. Find the payee's Certificate of Compliance as it stood on the day you paid, and its expiry date. How long that takes is the measure of the exposure, and it is a filing problem rather than a tax problem.

Then decide which half you are buying

Payroll and filing are local purchases here and we have said so above with the line of code to back it. What is left is cost, stock, evidence and control — a smaller conversation than most vendors will let you have, and the one we can actually stand behind.

Read before you shortlist

Guides for this market

HR & Payroll

The Pay Period Your Software Assumes

Twenty-six pay days do not fit into twelve months, and the two left over arrive on a six-monthly rhythm rather than by accident. Most finance systems store a payroll period as a calendar month and never mention it.

Dec 3, 2025 · 10 min Read

Accounting Insights

What Was The Rate Then?

Almost every finance system stores one tax rate per country and no date. That is correct until the first credit note against a pre-change invoice, and then it is confidently wrong with nothing to warn you.

Dec 4, 2025 · 11 min Read

Implementation & Rollout

Buying Operations Software in Papua New Guinea: A Straight Guide

Ask every vendor how many payroll runs their system accepts in one calendar month, and what reads a supplier certificate's expiry date at payment time. We publish our own answers, which are one and nothing.

Dec 4, 2025 · 14 min Read

Sales Insights

A Tax That Has Not Started Yet

The Marshall Islands passed a consumption tax in 2025 that applies to supplies made on or after 1 October 2026. Between those two dates sits every quotation, contract and recurring invoice a business raises — and almost no finance system can hold a rate and a date at the same time, including ours.

Sep 25, 2026 · 12 min Read

Point of Sale

Seven Days in the Form You Received It

Victoria makes a second-hand dealer keep goods exactly as they arrived for seven days, record where each item is stored, and — for scrap metal — never pay in cash. Our till is built for the other direction entirely.

Jul 23, 2026 · 13 min Read

Accounting Insights

A Tax Base That Crosses Your Workspaces

Victorian payroll tax groups employers across company boundaries, makes the liability joint and several, and lets a grouping determination take effect from an earlier date. Our workspaces are built not to produce that figure — deliberately.

Jul 22, 2026 · 13 min Read

Questions we are asked here

Straight answers, starting with the pay cycle

Can you run our fortnightly payroll?

No, and it is the first answer here rather than the last because it is the one that matters most. Our payroll module records one run per organization, per calendar month, per country of work, and that is enforced by a unique key on the table rather than by a setting — a second run inside the same month is refused by the database. The month is then assumed again in four places downstream: the timesheet lock is monthly and payroll will not calculate without it, the period end is computed as the last calendar day of the month, the attendance window starts on the first, and the input itself only accepts a year and a month. We quoted the constraint on this page rather than describing it. It is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now — but it is a data-model change rather than a feature, and we would rather you hear the size of it from us. If this is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will come back with a written specification, a timeline and a price before you commit to anything. Kenya's statutory payroll engine exists because a Kenyan client commissioned it, which is the only reason we can make that offer with a straight face.

Does Papua New Guinea require electronic invoicing?

No. The Internal Revenue Commission takes filings electronically, but invoices are not cleared or transmitted before they are valid the way they are in Kenya, Saudi Arabia or Tunisia. There is no pipeline to be connected to and no accreditation to hold, which means that for once the absence of an integration on our side is not a gap — there is nothing there to integrate with. We mention it because several pages in this cluster spend a long section on clearance and a reader arriving from one of them will look for it here. If that changes, this paragraph changes; we are not going to speculate about when.

How does the withholding on business payments actually work, and where do you fit?

The mechanism is the part worth understanding, and it is unusual: what you must deduct from a prescribed business payment depends on whether the PAYEE holds a current Certificate of Compliance from the Internal Revenue Commission. Not on the amount, not on the category of spend — on somebody else's document, and on whether it is in date on the day you pay. We deliberately do not print the rate anywhere on this page, for the same reason we do not print the Tunisian stamp duty: the percentage is the part that moves in a budget and the mechanism is the durable fact. Where we fit is narrow. We hold the certificate against the supplier with its date, we hold the payment with the invoices it cleared, and we keep the two retrievable together. What we do not have yet is an expiry-dated compliance status that the payment run reads, so that a payment to a supplier whose certificate lapsed is stopped before it leaves rather than found in a review. That one is on the roadmap and commissionable now — it is a field, a date and a rule at payment time, and it is a small enough build that we would quote it quickly.

Can you help us get foreign currency out faster?

No, and nobody selling you software can. A system can show you what is committed and in which currency, how long your settlements have actually taken over the last year, and which suppliers are waiting — which is genuinely useful for planning and for the conversation with your bank. It cannot affect availability, it cannot change an order, and any vendor implying otherwise is describing something that does not exist. This one is a boundary rather than a backlog, and you should want that answer, because the alternative is a supplier who will say yes in the meeting and be unable to explain themselves in month four. We argue this at length on our Malawi page and the reasoning carries over without modification.

We run camps, yards and remote sites with poor connectivity. Is that workable?

Partly, and the honest split matters more than the reassurance. What works is that the record of a place does not require somebody at that place: transfers are confirmed by the receiving location, counts are entered when a connection is available, and a site that is offline for two days produces a delayed record rather than a lost one. What does not work is a promise of full offline operation — this is a web application, and a location with no connectivity for a week is a location entering a week of data at the end of it. If genuine offline capture at the point of work is a requirement rather than a preference, say so early, because it is on the roadmap and commissionable rather than something we would pretend is already there, and it is a substantial build with a real price.

Why should a Nairobi vendor be trusted about a Papua New Guinean pay cycle?

Because of the item we volunteered rather than the ones we claimed. The page opens by quoting a constraint in our own database that makes fortnightly payroll impossible, names the four places downstream that would also have to change, and there is a test in the repository pinning the behaviour so a fix has to be deliberate. That is checkable in a way a reference story is not, and it is the only kind of evidence a vendor with no local presence has any business offering. The rest is ordinary and we will not dress it up: no office here, no implementation partner, support remote from Nairobi in English with about three hours of overlap with your working day. Ask us what happens when the person who implemented your system leaves — and ask the same question of every vendor whose page has nothing on it they would rather you did not read.

Can the system handle GST on imports and the cost of getting goods to site?

Yes, and this is the half of the market we are genuinely for. Duty, GST at import, port and handling charges, coastal shipping and inland haulage attach to the consignment as their invoices arrive rather than only at receipt, and the unit cost recalculates each time. Where a single delivery involves three carriers billing weeks apart, that open receipt is the whole difference between a landed cost and an estimate. What the system will not do is tell you whether a particular import is exempt or at what rate — that is a question for your accountant and the Commission, and we hold the rate you configure rather than an opinion about it.

What about Australian or New Zealand parent-company reporting?

We can give the group consistent operational figures — cost by site, by project and by cost centre, in kina and in the currency the transaction actually happened in, on the same basis every month. What we do not do is produce a statutory consolidation or anything an Australian or New Zealand filing obligation would accept, and we have deliberately not written pages for either market. That is a boundary rather than a backlog and the reasoning is worth stating, because it also tells you what we are: a group with a real Australian reporting obligation should be buying that capability from somebody with an Australian bench, and we would rather sit under it as the operational layer than pretend to replace it.

Count last year's pay runs

Twenty-six pay days, and the number of payroll records your system actually produced. Bring the difference and we will tell you honestly which half of your problem we are for — the page above should already have told you which half we are not.

Talk to us about Papua New Guinea See plans & pricing