Exchange: moving payroll between instances

Why Exchange

Each company using Mintage Payroll runs in its own instance. That keeps data separate, but it makes some ordinary business events awkward: a group reorganises, a team moves to a sister company, or a company outgrows its first setup. Until now, moving people meant re-entering them.

Exchange is the answer we built this month. It packages up employees along with their current-year payroll details and imports them into another Mintage instance. Most of the work was in the details: making sure PAYE settings came across intact, avoiding duplicate records on import, matching older calculation types, and routing imported pay through the same code paths a payroll officer would use, so the numbers are rebuilt rather than copied blindly. We limited it to the current year to keep transfers predictable. On the frontend, a new Exchange area in settings covers configuration, incoming transfers and starting an outgoing one.

Smaller wins

Form 7B, the certificate employees need for their tax affairs, can now be sent straight to employees by email or WhatsApp. Loan payments made in cash now get their own receipt numbers and downloadable receipts. Employee phone numbers from Canada, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States are now accepted.

We replaced a third-party help widget with our own support ticket dialog, so users can raise an issue with screenshots or PDFs attached without leaving the app. Real-time updates now travel over private channels for each instance.

Overtime and day rates

For a client whose staff are paid by day rates across different work locations, we added new salary and allowance formulas. We also refined how the tax-free overtime cap is spread across the year and added a command that checks for overtime claimed beyond the cap. March came to 208 commits.