Lab: Running March payroll

Before you start

Open the demo:

• URL: https://aion-erp.vercel.app
• Username: admin
• Password: Admin123

Your mission: Run March 2026 payroll for Oasis Fresh’s 20-person workforce, from creation to GL posting.

Estimated time: 8 minutes.

Step 1 — Review an employee master

Navigate to: HR → Employees and open any employee.

Familiarize yourself with the tabs:

• Personal — name, ID, contact
• Employment — position, grade, start date, cost center
• Compensation — salary components with effective dates
• Leave — current balances (annual, sick, etc.)
• Loans — any outstanding loans and repayment schedule
• Documents — uploaded contracts, IDs, etc.

This is the master data payroll uses.

Step 2 — Check attendance for the period

Navigate to: HR → Attendance → March 2026.

You’ll see the attendance register. For the demo, expect it to be mostly pre-populated with a full month of standard working days. Scan for:

• Overtime entries (highlighted)
• Absences (with reason codes)
• Late arrivals beyond tolerance

In a real deployment, this would be fed from biometric devices. In the demo, it’s seeded data.

Step 3 — Check leave approvals

Navigate to: HR → Leave Requests. Filter to March 2026.

You should see a handful of approved leaves for the period. These feed into payroll automatically (paid leave doesn’t deduct; unpaid leave does).

Step 4 — Create the pay run

Navigate to: HR → Pay Runs → New.

Fill in:

• Period: March 2026
• Pay date: April 5, 2026
• Scope: all active employees (or filter by cost center for a partial run)

Click Generate. AION processes every employee:

• Loads master record
• Loads attendance
• Loads approved leave
• Loads active loans
• Computes pro-rata pay, overtime, allowances
• Computes deductions (GOSI, tax if applicable, loans, unpaid leave)
• Produces draft amounts

This takes 5-30 seconds for 20 employees.

Step 5 — Review the pay run

The pay run shows:

• Summary: total gross, total net, total employer cost, employee count
• Exceptions: anything unusual (very high overtime, unusual deductions, new hires, terminations)
• Employee detail: click any row to see the full calculation

Typical summary for the demo:

Line	Amount
Total gross salaries	~185,000 SAR
Total allowances	~45,000 SAR
Total deductions (GOSI, tax, loan, unpaid leave)	~38,000 SAR
Total net pay	~192,000 SAR
Employer GOSI contribution	~22,000 SAR
Monthly EOS accrual	~15,000 SAR
Total employer cost for March	~229,000 SAR

Drill into any employee to see their calculation: gross, each allowance line, each deduction line, net pay.

Step 6 — Approve the pay run

HR manager’s approval button (in the demo, you’re acting as admin). Click Approve.

Pay run status moves from Draft to Approved.

Step 7 — Post to GL

Click Post to GL.

The payroll SLA resolver fires. One journal batch is posted:

Account	DR	CR
6200 Salary Expense	185,000
6210 Allowances Expense	45,000
6220 Employer GOSI	22,000
6230 EOS Accrual	15,000
2300 AP — Salaries Payable		192,000
2310 GOSI Liability		40,000 (employer + employee)
2320 Tax Withheld		0 (no income tax in Saudi for most cases)
2330 Loan Deductions Liability		8,000
2340 EOS Liability		15,000
2350 Unpaid Leave Receivable		(if any unpaid leave taken)

(Balanced; actual numbers depend on seed data.)

Check it: navigate to GL → Trial Balance. Salary, allowance, and employer cost accounts show the March payroll impact. The liability accounts show what you owe (to employees, GOSI, etc.) — these clear when you make the payments.

Step 8 — Generate pay slips

Click Generate Pay Slips. AION creates a PDF for each employee (bilingual) showing:

• Employee name, position, department
• Attendance for the period (days, overtime hours)
• Compensation breakdown (base, allowances)
• Deductions breakdown (GOSI, tax, loan, etc.)
• Net pay
• Year-to-date totals

In real deployments, pay slips are emailed automatically or made available in self-service.

Step 9 — Generate bank file (WPS)

Click Generate Bank File. AION produces a CSV or WPS-formatted file with:

• Employee name
• IBAN
• Net pay amount
• Pay date

Treasury uploads this to the bank on pay day. Salaries disburse automatically.

GL impact when salaries are paid (next step after this lab):

Account	DR	CR
2300 AP — Salaries Payable	192,000
1010 Bank		192,000

The AP — Salaries balance returns to zero. Cash is out the door.

What you just did

In 8 minutes, you ran payroll for 20 employees end-to-end. In a typical SMB factory, this is 3-5 days of work every month for a payroll clerk plus an HR manager.

The saving isn’t just hours — it’s:

• Accurate calculations — no Excel typos, no missed deductions
• Compliant files — GOSI file, tax file, bank file all generated automatically
• Audit trail — every pay run has who generated it, approved it, posted it
• Pay slips on time — every employee gets theirs, correct, bilingual, every month
• EOS accruals build up monthly — so when someone leaves, the liability is already booked

What would have been different with Excel

• Base salary from one file, overtime from another, loans from a third — manual lookup for each
• Typos in GOSI calculations trigger authority letters and fines
• Tax withholding often forgotten until year-end, then fixed in one catch-up entry
• EOS accrued only at exit — the balance sheet lies all year
• Pay slips handed out late, often in English only, often wrong

Also runs in Pearl F&B (Qatar) and Nile Foods (Egypt)

The same payroll flow runs across all three demo Business Groups — but the social insurance, tax brackets, and bank file formats differ by country.

	🇸🇦 Oasis Fresh (Saudi)	🇶🇦 Pearl F&B (Qatar)	🇪🇬 Nile Foods (Egypt)
Currency	SAR	QAR	EGP
Social insurance	GOSI (Saudi nationals only)	Qatari Pension (nationals)	Egyptian Social Insurance
Income tax	None (Saudi)	None	Progressive brackets
Bank file	WPS-aligned	WPS-aligned (Qatar variant)	Egyptian payroll bank format
Employee count	20	20	25
CFO login	cfo.saudi	cfo.qatar	cfo.egypt

The payroll engine handles each country’s specifics via the country profile. End-of-service benefits, leave accruals, and gross-to-net all compute per the local rules. The seeded Nile Foods BG has 25 employees with Egyptian income tax brackets to explore.

Try the same lab in another region:

• 🇶🇦 Pearl F&B (Qatar) →
• 🇪🇬 Nile Foods (Egypt) →

Next lesson

In Lesson 5 — GL impact & compliance, we’ll look at the complete GL picture, the compliance reports AION generates (GOSI, WPS, EOS), and the ROI of running H2R properly.