Payroll

The Payroll screen is where you review what your team is owed for a pay period and commit a payroll run. It shows each employee’s gross pay for the period — calculated for you on the server — and lets you run payroll once the numbers look right. Because payroll commits money, the screen is deliberate: it shows you the total before you commit, and once a run is created it’s locked and can’t be changed. This guide walks through reviewing the period, how gross pay is worked out, running payroll, history, and exports.

Reviewing a pay period

The Payroll Center opens on a pay period and shows a review grid with one row per employee:

• Employee and pay type (hourly, weekly salary, or annual salary).
• Regular hours and overtime hours (for hourly employees).
• Gross pay — the amount that employee earned for the period.

The top of the screen summarises the total gross pay and the employee count for the period. All money and hours line up in a fixed-width font so the columns are easy to scan.

Use the Previous period and Next period buttons to move between pay periods; the grid and totals update to the period you choose.

How gross pay is calculated

QELM works out each employee’s gross pay for you, on the server — the screen shows the final figure and never re-does the math itself. The calculation depends on the pay type:

• Weekly salary — the employee’s set weekly salary, regardless of hours.
• Annual salary — the annual salary divided by 52 for the week.
• Hourly — hours worked times the hourly rate.
• Hourly with overtime — for overtime-eligible employees who work more than 40 hours in the period, the first 40 hours are paid at the normal rate and the hours over 40 are paid at one-and-a-half times the rate.
• Lunch deductions — for employees who aren’t lunch-exempt, automatic lunch deductions from their time entries are already reflected in the hours that feed gross pay.

These are the same calculations the Timesheets screen uses, so the hours and the pay always agree across QELM.

Gross-calc only — no tax filing

QELM’s payroll is gross-calculation only. It figures out each employee’s gross pay (what they earned before taxes and deductions) so you have an accurate, locked record to hand to your payroll provider or accountant. It does not calculate or file payroll taxes, withholdings, or net pay. Use the gross figures and the exports here as the input to whatever you use to actually pay and file.

Running payroll

When the period’s numbers look right, select Run Payroll. Because this commits money, QELM asks you to confirm first — “Run payroll for this period?” — and the confirmation shows you the total gross pay and the number of employees you’re about to commit, so you can review the numbers one last time before confirming.

When you confirm, QELM creates the payroll run on the server and then shows you the resulting locked run. The screen waits for the server to finish before showing the run — it never assumes the run succeeded, so what you see is always the real, committed result.

If payroll has already been run for a period, the screen tells you so and links to the existing locked run instead of letting you run it again — a period can’t be committed twice.

Payroll history

The Payroll history view lists every locked payroll run for your company, newest first, with the pay period, the employee count, the total gross, and when (and by whom) it was locked. Select a run to open its detail.

Run detail and exports

A run’s detail shows the locked snapshot: each employee’s pay type, hours, and gross pay exactly as they were when the run was created, plus the period total. From here you can export:

• PDF — a printable payroll summary, generated by QELM and opened in a new tab.
• CSV — the same figures as a spreadsheet file for your records or your payroll provider.

Why a locked run can’t change

A payroll run is a permanent snapshot. Once it’s locked, its numbers are fixed — even if time entries are edited afterwards, the run keeps the figures it was committed with. This is deliberate: a payroll record needs to stay exactly as it was when you ran it, so it’s a reliable history of what was paid.

A note on what you see

The Payroll screen shows only your own workspace’s employees and runs, and the figures reflect the hours your team has clocked or entered for the period. If a period looks empty, it usually just means no active employees or hours were found for it — use the period navigation to find another period. For how hours flow into pay, see the Timesheets guide or the Guides overview.