Bonuses, claims, loans and perks

Pay a bonus in the month it is due, let people claim fuel and phone against what they have earned, take loan requests, and record perks for tax.

These are the extra money inputs that feed a payroll run. Everything here is in rupees and paise exactly as you enter it; Maska never rounds a figure you typed. Only people who can prepare payroll and read private pay details see the amounts.

Bonuses

Payroll › Salaries › Bonuses lists every bonus with the month it is due.

Add bonus: pick the person, an ad-hoc earning component (from Settings › Components), the amount and the payout month. You cannot add a bonus for yourself; another HR admin does that.
A bonus waits as Due until a run of its month, or a later one, pays it. A bonus that was not paid in its month stays due and shows as Overdue in the next run.
Import adds many bonuses at once from a spreadsheet: employee code, bonus component, amount, payout month and an optional note.
Cancel a bonus with a reason. A bonus a run is holding goes back to the run’s next refresh; a bonus a locked run is holding cannot change until Finance unlocks that run.

In the run, stage 3 › Bonus shows every due bonus with three choices:

Pay now: paid as taxable pay in this run.
Defer: not paid now; it stays due for a later run.
Paid outside: you paid it some other way. It is never paid in payroll, but it still counts as taxable income for TDS in this month. Net pay does not change.

A bonus is paid once. If a run that took it is cancelled or unlocked, the bonus goes back to Due.

Operations › Tools › Bonus bulk delete removes bonuses added by mistake that no run has paid: those still due and those marked paid outside. It asks before deleting and tells you which ones it kept and why.

Component claims

Some reimbursements, like fuel or phone, are paid when the employee claims them rather than every month. Mark such a reimbursement component Paid on claim in Settings › Components. From then on:

The component no longer pays every month. It accrues instead: each released run adds the month’s amount, reduced for loss of pay days.
The employee sees, in Me › Finances › Claims (or My pay › Claims in the staff app), what has accrued, what they have claimed and the balance. They claim an amount up to the balance and attach bills when the component asks for them. A pending claim can be withdrawn.
If the salary has no claimable component, the section says so in one line.

HR decides claims in Payroll › Approvals › Component claims (Pending, Approved, Rejected). Approve in full, approve part of it with a comment, or reject with a reason. Several claims can be approved together, each in full. You cannot decide your own claim. Claims also appear in your Inbox under Payroll.

An approved claim is paid tax-free in stage 4 › Component claims of the run of its month. In the March run, whatever is still unclaimed for the year is paid as taxable pay, once.

To enter claims for people who handed in paper bills, open Operations › Tools and pick the component’s card. The grid shows, for each person, what accrued and was claimed until last month, and a box for this month’s claim. You can fill the grid from a spreadsheet (employee code and amount), review it, and save. Each saved row is approved by you straight away and recorded.

Loans

Payroll › Loans has five tabs:

Outstanding: loans still being repaid, with totals at the top (outstanding principal, EMI each month, ongoing loans, total issued) and filters for category, department and location. Salary advances are here too, behind the Salary advances switch.
Cleared: loans fully repaid, with the day the last EMI was recovered.
Requests: loans employees asked for. Approve and issue opens the issue form already filled in from the request; issuing the loan approves the request. Reject asks for a reason the employee reads.
Policies: who may ask for a loan and how much. A policy sets active employees only, not while serving notice, a minimum tenure, a maximum amount as a multiple of monthly gross pay, the most months to repay and how many loans a person can have open at once (default 1). Open a policy to add or remove the people it covers. Without a policy, employees see “Loans are not offered to your role — ask HR”.
Categories: the kinds of loan you give, each with a code, a default interest rate and whether the perquisite rule applies for tax.

Only people who manage payroll setup can change policies and categories. EMIs are recovered in stage 4 of each run.

Issuing a loan checks the person’s limits again: the most they can owe, the most cut from salary each month and the policy’s limits. Issuing over a limit needs a payroll approver for the whole organisation, or the tenant admin, and a written reason, which then shows on the loan. See Advance and loan limits.

Perks

Payroll › Benefits › Perks lists benefits in kind such as company accommodation or a meal card. Each has a taxable value a month that you enter; Maska does not calculate it. Benefits › Assignments records who holds which perk, from which month and until which month. Each month a person holds a perk, its value is added to their taxable income for TDS. It is never paid as cash, so net pay does not change.

Payroll & finance approvals

Payroll › Approvals › Payroll & finance is Finance’s list of what is waiting: runs to lock, full and final settlements in those runs, component claims and loan requests, each with how many are waiting and when the latest came in. Salary revisions and bonuses are applied directly by HR and need no approval. The Approvals count in the header adds the runs waiting to be locked to the payroll requests in your Inbox, so nothing is counted twice.