Where the history starts
Every product has a first commit, and ours is not glamorous. On 30 December 2020 the team created a new repository and installed a fresh copy of Laravel 8, the PHP framework that still sits underneath Mintage Payroll today. That is the whole month: two commits, an initial commit and the framework install.
We chose Laravel because it gave us a lot of the dull but essential pieces out of the box: routing, a database layer, queues, scheduled jobs and a large set of well-maintained packages. For a small team, not having to rebuild those basics means more time for the parts that are actually hard, which in payroll means getting the numbers right.
Not yet a payroll product
It is worth being honest about what this repository was at the time. It was not yet called Mintage, and it was not yet about payroll. It was a general-purpose foundation that we intended to reuse across projects. The payroll work came a few months later, once the foundation had proven itself.
We are publishing these month-by-month notes because the path from an empty project to a product that handles GRA PAYE, NIS and payslips was not a straight line. Some early decisions stuck, some were reversed within weeks, and a few shaped everything that followed. Starting the story here, with a blank framework and a short commit log, keeps the rest of it honest.
January is where the real groundwork begins: sign-in, roles and permissions, a modular structure and an audit trail.
This article was written from Mintage Payroll’s commit history for December 2020. See Mintage Payroll today