Salary Structures That Survive an Increment
Reusable components, percentage or fixed amounts, per-employee overrides and effective-dated revisions — so changing one person's pay does not quietly change everyone's.
A salary structure looks like a solved problem until the first exception arrives. One employee negotiates a different HRA. A whole grade moves to a new basic percentage. Someone is promoted on the 18th. A component is renamed, and last year's payslips stop reconciling. The usual response is to copy the structure, edit the copy, and assign it to one person — and within two years the company has forty structures, nobody remembers which differs from which, and a change to the statutory basic percentage has to be applied forty times. AttendancePay separates the three things that get conflated: the component library that defines what an earning or deduction is and how it is computed, the structure that assembles components into a package, and the per-employee record that can override a specific value without cloning the whole structure. Revisions are effective-dated rather than destructive, so an increment applies from the day it takes effect and the previous figures remain intact for anyone who needs to reconcile an old payslip.
How salary structures decay
Structures multiply until nobody can maintain them
Every exception becomes a cloned structure. A statutory change then has to be applied to each clone by hand, and the one that gets missed is discovered by an employee rather than by finance.
Editing a component changes history
A component is edited or deleted and prior payroll entries that referenced it stop making sense. Reconciling a payslip from two years ago becomes impossible, which is precisely when you are asked to.
Percentage components double-count
A structure defines HRA as a percentage of basic while basic itself is a percentage of CTC, and a change at the top propagates in a way nobody predicted. Arriving at a target gross becomes trial and error.
Increments are applied to the whole month
A promotion effective the 18th is applied to all 30 days because the system has no notion of an effective date, so the employee is overpaid and the correction lands next month as an unexplained deduction.
The CTC on the offer letter is not the CTC payroll computes
Employer PF, gratuity provisioning and other employer costs are counted inconsistently, so recruitment quotes one number and payroll produces another.
How salary structure management works
- 1
Define components once
Earnings, deductions and employer contributions are defined in a reusable library — fixed amounts, percentages of a chosen base, or statutory components that call the compliance engine directly.
- 2
Assemble structures from those components
A structure is a named assembly of components for a grade, a location or a role. Changing a component definition updates every structure that uses it, rather than requiring the same edit forty times.
- 3
Override at the employee level where needed
An individual can carry a different value for a specific component without cloning the structure, which is what stops the structure list from growing without bound.
- 4
Revise with an effective date
Increments and structural changes are recorded as effective-dated revisions. Payroll resolves the record that applies to the period being run, so history stays intact and mid-month changes pro-rate correctly.
- 5
Validate before it reaches payroll
A structure is checked for consistency — components that do not sum to the intended gross, percentage bases that double-count, missing statutory components — before anyone is paid on it.
What you get
Reusable component library
Earnings, deductions and employer contributions defined once and shared across structures, with fixed, percentage-of-base or statutory calculation types.
Basic, gross and CTC-driven structures
Build from any anchor — a target CTC, a target gross or a defined basic — with the remaining components derived rather than hand-computed.
Per-employee overrides
Change one component for one person without cloning the structure, so exceptions do not become permanent maintenance.
Effective-dated revisions
Every change carries the date it takes effect and a reason, and the full revision history is retained per employee.
Hourly and monthly salary types
Employees can be paid monthly on payable days or hourly from recorded hours, with configurable standard hours and overtime multipliers.
Employer cost visibility
Employer PF, ESI and gratuity provisioning are shown as employer cost, so the CTC quoted at offer stage is the CTC payroll computes.
Structure validation
Consistency checks catch double-counted percentage bases and structures that do not resolve to the intended gross before payroll runs on them.
Bulk assignment and revision
Apply a structure or an increment across a group of employees in one action, with the effective date applied consistently.
Who this is for
See salary structure management on your own data
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Frequently asked questions
Can one employee have a different HRA without creating a new structure?⌄
Yes. Per-employee overrides let you change a specific component value for one person while they remain on the shared structure. This is deliberately the recommended route, because cloning a structure for every exception is what makes structure libraries unmaintainable within a couple of years.
What happens to past payslips if we edit a component?⌄
Payroll entries retain the figures computed at the time they were run, so editing a component definition does not retroactively change a payslip that has already been issued. Salary revisions are effective-dated for the same reason — the record that applied to a past period remains resolvable.
Can we build a structure from a target CTC?⌄
Yes. Structures can be anchored on CTC, on gross, or on a defined basic, with the remaining components derived. The employer-cost components — employer PF, ESI and gratuity provisioning — are shown explicitly so the CTC figure means the same thing to recruitment and to payroll.
How are mid-month increments handled?⌄
A revision carries an effective date, and payroll resolves the salary record applicable to each part of the period. An increment effective the 18th applies from the 18th rather than to the whole month.
Is gratuity calculated?⌄
Gratuity is provisioned as an employer cost within CTC where the structure includes a gratuity component. Final settlement gratuity on exit — the fifteen days per year of service calculation with the eligibility period and statutory cap — is not part of the payroll engine. We would rather state that plainly than let the CTC line imply a settlement capability that is not there.
Can we pay some employees hourly?⌄
Yes. Salary type is set per employee. Hourly employees are paid from recorded hours at their configured rate, with standard hours per day and per month and an overtime multiplier configurable, and they can run in the same payroll cycle as monthly salaried staff.