Payroll brings together who works for the company, how much each person earns and what has already been paid. Each month you generate the payroll, check each person's net pay, pay it and send the receipt. Every payment becomes a company expense and comes out of the balance of the account you choose, so the cash flow and the income statement already show your personnel cost without any manual entry.
Go to Management › Employees. The Payroll page has four tabs: Pending Payrolls, Employees, Processed Payrolls and Recurrences.
For the example we'll use Estúdio Aurora, Marina's design studio. She hired Rafael, a designer on a CLT contract (Brazilian formal employment), with a salary of R$ 4,500, and wants to pay the October payroll from the Conta PJ Inter account.
First: set up INSS and IRRF
Finances calculates net pay from the taxes you registered in Settings › Taxes. It uses the active tax types whose name contains INSS (social security) or IRRF (income tax withheld at source). A tax called IRPJ doesn't count, because it's a company tax and isn't deducted from the employee.
As long as neither is set up, the page shows the warning Payroll taxes not configured, with a button to configure them. If you ignore it, the payroll comes out with net pay equal to gross pay.
The rate is flat and applies to the gross salary, without the progressive table. Marina registered INSS at 9% and IRRF at 7.5%. If an employee has a different rate, adjust their item in that month's payroll (see below).
Register your employees
On the Employees tab, click New Employee. The form has six sections:
- Personal Information: full name, email and phone. The email is where the receipt goes, so it's worth filling in.
- Professional Information: position, department, salary, hire date and Employment type, which can be CLT, PJ (contractor company), internship, apprentice, temporary, intermittent, self-employed, partner or other.
- Address.
- Additional Information: blood type, marital status and gender.
- Emergency Contacts, with relationship and priority.
- Attachments, for the contract, documents and medical exams.
The Salary on the record is the gross amount the payroll starts from. Marina registered Rafael as Designer, Creative department, CLT, at R$ 4,500.
Positions and departments come from Settings › Positions & Departments.
Generate the month's payroll
Click New Payment. The New Payroll window opens:
- Employees: pick one or more, or check Include all active employees.
- Reference month: the month the payroll pays for.
- Payment method.
When you click Create Payroll, each employee becomes an item with gross, INSS, IRRF and net already calculated. For Rafael in October:
- Gross salary: R$ 4,500.00
- INSS (9%): R$ 405.00
- IRRF (7.5%): R$ 337.50
- Net salary: R$ 3,757.50
There is one payroll per reference month. If you hire someone mid-month and generate the October payroll again, only employees not yet in it are added. Nobody is duplicated.
The payroll starts in Pending Payrolls and moves to Processed Payrolls once every item is paid.
Adjust the item when the month is different
Overtime, an absence, an advance? Open the item and use Edit payroll item. You can change the Gross salary and add Other deductions, plus internal Notes. INSS and IRRF are recalculated on the new gross, and the summary shows the net before you save. Deductions can't exceed the gross.
Rafael took a R$ 150 advance in October. Marina entered it in Other deductions, and his net went down to R$ 3,607.50.
You can only edit the item while it's pending. Once it's paid, reverse the payment first.
Pay and send the receipt
On the item, click Make Payment. The payment window asks for:
- Amount and Payment date.
- Payment method.
- Debit account: where the money comes from.
- Send receipt by email to employee, if you want them to get it right away.
When you confirm, three things happen:
- Finances creates a paid expense for the net amount, in the system category Payroll, with the accrual month set to the payroll month.
- The net amount comes out of the chosen account. Marina's Conta PJ Inter went from R$ 38,000 to R$ 34,392.50.
- The item is marked as paid and the receipt is available.
The expense is recorded at the net amount. The INSS and IRRF withheld are stored on the item and the receipt, but they don't become expenses on their own. Record the tax bill in Tax › Taxes with a tax type classified as Payroll Charges and Withholdings, and pay it there. That bill is what brings INSS and IRRF into the personnel cost on the income statement, so it shows the cost at gross, not just net.
Need the receipt later? On the item, use Generate Receipt to download the PDF or Send Email to send it to the employee. The receipt is always in Brazilian reais and in Portuguese, whatever language you use.
Paid by mistake? Reverse it
Use Reverse payment. The linked expense is deleted, the amount goes back to the account balance and the item becomes pending again, ready to be edited and paid.
Let the payroll create itself: recurrences
On the Recurrences tab, click New recurrence and fill in:
- Employee.
- Cycle: once, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual.
- Next run: the date the employee is added to the payroll. It can't be in the past.
- Whether the recurrence is active, and notes.
Every day, early in the morning, Finances processes the recurrences that are due and adds the employee to the payroll of the scheduled date's month. The recurrence creates the item but doesn't pay it: paying stays your decision, because it's money leaving the account.
Marina created a monthly recurrence for Rafael with the next run on November 1st. That day, the November payroll shows up in Pending Payrolls with him already calculated.
You can pause a recurrence by turning it inactive and resume it later. If the employee is already in that month's payroll, the recurrence counts the cycle as done and just moves the date forward. If the employee is deactivated, it's skipped.
When someone leaves
On the Employees tab, use Deactivate employee and enter the termination date and reason. The person stops being added to new payrolls and recurrences, but their payment history stays. If they come back, you can reactivate the record.
How payroll connects to the rest
- Expenses: each payment appears in the company's expense list, in the Payroll category.
- Accounts: the net amount is debited from the chosen account and shows in its statement.
- Cash Flow: the outflow lands on the payment date.
- Income statement: the payroll's net amount goes into personnel expenses for the reference month, even before it's paid, and the INSS and IRRF bills recorded in Taxes complete the gross amount. The expense created by the payment isn't added again.
- Taxes: the INSS and IRRF rates come from Settings › Taxes.
Who can do what
Anyone in the company, including Viewers, can see the payroll. Registering employees, generating payrolls, paying, reversing and managing recurrences requires the Member role or higher.
Where to go next
- Taxes: set up INSS and IRRF and track tax payments.
- Company expenses and income: where payroll payments show up.
- Management income statement: how much payroll weighs on the month's result.
- Cash flow: when the payroll money actually leaves.
In short: set up INSS and IRRF in Settings › Taxes, register employees with their salary, generate the month's payroll, adjust the item of anyone with an extra deduction, pay by choosing the debit account, send the receipt and create a recurrence so next month's payroll appears on its own.