Payslips where people already are
Email suits some workplaces, but many employees in Guyana use WhatsApp far more than an inbox. In April the e-payslips module gained a job that sends a payslip over WhatsApp, using an approved message template and dispatched with a short delay so a large payroll does not go out all at once. Employee records gained a mobile phone field to hold them. Emailed payslips were also changed to send a little later from the queue rather than immediately. This was groundwork: the WhatsApp feature kept being refined in later months.
Platform and reports
We upgraded the backend to Laravel 10, then spent part of the month tidying: removing unused code, adding return types, and moving hard-coded settings into configuration. Commit messages also switched to a consistent conventional format around this time, which makes the history much easier to read back.
On the reporting side, the year-to-date export now shows PAYE before refunds, PAYE after refunds and the refund amount, which helps when reconciling the year. Spreadsheet exports now pick a dark or light font automatically based on each cell's background colour.
One step back
Not everything stuck. Early in the month we moved several exports to an auto-adjusted PAYE total, and later in April we reverted those changes and went back to the earlier figures. A new gross salary formula for reducing pay by fixed weekdays did stay. April came to 139 commits.
This article was written from Mintage Payroll’s commit history for April 2023. See Mintage Payroll today