Getting data in
Almost every payroll we take on starts life as a spreadsheet. Retyping hundreds of rows by hand is slow and error-prone, so the main job in January was a proper import tool. Mintage can now take an Excel file for monthly payrolls with salaries, and for fortnightly payrolls with a basic hourly rate, along with each employee's payment frequency.
The import cleans up values as it reads them, so a value typed with a dollar sign and commas is still read as a number, and it validates the whole file before writing anything. We also added an export of the import template, so people start from the right columns instead of guessing.
Smarter calculations
Allowances can now be driven by formula types rather than a single fixed figure, which covers the many ways employers actually pay them. Pension plan deductions were corrected to work from basic salary, lost time now shows properly on payslips, and net pay can be rounded according to the employer's preference. We also added support for club and association deductions that some workplaces run through payroll.
Under the hood
We moved PDF generation away from a hosted service to an open-source HTML-to-PDF renderer that we run ourselves, which gives us more control over how payslips and reports look. Loans gained their own identifiers, payroll changes started being recorded in an activity log, and the platform moved to PHP 8.2. Some new helper tests went in alongside.
In total the team made 194 commits this month, many of them small fixes to exports, pagination and payslip layout as the new pieces settled in.
This article was written from Mintage Payroll’s commit history for January 2023. See Mintage Payroll today