Running a payroll cycle
Draft, review, approve, pay — what each stage means and what can still be changed at each one.
A payroll run moves through four states, and what you can change narrows at each one.
Draft
Created for a month and an entity. Everything is editable: additions, deductions, loan instalments, days worked. Nothing has been shown to anybody and nothing has been paid.
Awaiting approval
Submitted for review. The figures are frozen; a correction means sending it back to draft, which is recorded rather than silent. Payslips do not exist yet.
Approved
Payslips are generated and visible to employees. The run cannot be edited. A mistake found here is corrected in the next cycle or by a rolled-back run, and a rollback stays in the history — a payroll month that quietly changed after people saw their payslips is worse than one that visibly did.
Paid
The bank file has been produced. For UAE entities that is a WPS SIF file, and it will refuse rather than generate if any employee is missing a routing code or an IBAN — the refusal lists exactly who, so the fix is one screen away.