Managing employees

The Employees section is where you maintain the roster of people on your payroll. Everything else — payroll runs, payslips, tax filings — reads from this list.

Adding a joiner

From Employees → Add employee, capture:

• Identity. Full name, SA ID number (or passport for foreign nationals), date of birth, tax reference number.
• Employment. Job title, start date, employment type (permanent / fixed-term / casual / commission-earner).
• Pay. Gross salary, pay frequency (monthly / bi-weekly / weekly), and any standard allowances.
• Banking. Bank name, account number, branch code. We’ll default to the universal branch code.
• Tax status. Whether the employee qualifies for the primary, secondary (65+), or tertiary (75+) rebate.
• Optional. Medical aid main member & dependants, retirement fund contribution percentage, salary sacrifice arrangements.

You can add joiners mid-month. payloop will pro-rate the first payslip based on the start date.

Editing details

Click any employee row to open their profile. Editable fields include:

• Salary. Effective from a date you choose — the change doesn’t apply retroactively.
• Banking. Updates apply to the next payroll run.
• Medical aid & dependants. Affects monthly tax credits (R 376 main + first dependant, R 254 each additional in 2026/27).
• Retirement contributions. Both pension and provident-fund contributions reduce taxable income, capped at 27.5% of remuneration / R 430 000 a year.

Every edit is logged with the user, timestamp, and reason. You can see the audit trail under Employee → History.

Processing leavers

Open the employee, click Terminate. You’ll set:

• Last working day.
• Reason (resignation, retrenchment, dismissal, retirement, end of contract, death).
• Final-pay rules — unused leave pay-out, severance, notice pay, 13th cheque pro-ration.

We’ll calculate the final payment, generate the leaver’s IRP5/IT3(a) within 14 days as required, and add them to your next interim or annual EMP501.

Don’t delete leavers. Marking them as terminated keeps the historical record SARS expects to see. Deleting an employee who’s ever received a payslip will break your annual reconciliation.

Tax statuses, briefly

Rebates are additive. A 76-year-old gets all three for a total of R 30 834. We apply this automatically based on date of birth.

If you want the full maths, the long version is here: How to calculate PAYE, UIF and SDL in South Africa (2026/27 tables).

Importing in bulk

For larger changes — an acquisition, a department migration, a year-start refresh — use Settings → Import. Upload the same CSV template you used for onboarding, with a change_type column set to update, terminate, or add per row.

We validate every row before committing. Rows with errors are flagged with a reason and you can fix and re-upload only the failed rows.

Self-service for employees

If you enable the mobile app, employees can update their own:

• Banking details (with two-factor confirmation).
• Personal contact details.
• Medical-aid dependants.
• Tax reference number (one-time, after which they can’t edit it).

You’ll be notified of every change and can roll it back inside 24 hours if it’s wrong.