Community Learning Series - Personalising your payroll experience using Zoho Payroll

We all know that employees are the most important asset for any organisation. Organisations spend copious amounts of time recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient employment to maintain their business health and operations. And one of the most important ways that business owners look after their primary assets is timely payroll. In this Community Learning Series post, we will focus on customising some of the crucial elements within the payroll journey.

But why even customise? Irrespective of the size of the organisation, payroll plays a huge role in employee morale. While timely payroll is essential, personalising the employee experience is also important. Zoho Payroll helps you out with plenty of customisation options for various stages within the payroll process, so you can deliver a completely custom experience right from the moment your employee joins your organisation to the day they receive their full and final settlement.

Here, we will talk about three features of Zoho Payroll and how they can be customised to your needs.

Email templates
Payslip templates
Organisation announcements

1. Email templates

Despite the variety of instant messaging platforms in existence, we still rely on emails for most of our professional communication. The reason is very simple: emails add a professional touch, but still pass on information instantly. In payroll, it's often important for communication to reach your employees in a professional and timely manner. Zoho Payroll helps you personalise this communication experience with templates specific to different scenarios.

Has a new employee joined your organisation today? Time to welcome them with a personalised message that reflects your organisation's culture. You can save the voice and tone you've chosen for your message, using a template.

Inside Zoho Payroll, go to Settings -> Email templates -> Employee invitation. As you can see in the below image, we have a predefined template set up for your convenience, but you can customise it to suit your brand and voice. You can make changes to the text size and font, and add links, photographs, and placeholders. We even provide the complete HTML code, which you can edit to make the changes you need.

Once you make your changes, click Save. Now whenever an employee joins, they will receive the newly customised email you created specifically to welcome them.

You can customise other emails in the same way here. For example, this payslip notification template has been customised by adding a motivational quote, which can be changed every month. Or if you have revised employees' salaries this month, you can mention the change in the email.

These are just a few examples of how to utilise this customisation. Now it's your turn.

2. Payslip templates

Why are payslips so important? A payslip is a proof of the contract that binds any employee to an organisation. Professional-looking payslips will be considered as credible proof for future employment, or for obtaining employee loans. A detailed payslip showcases all the employee's tax liabilities, thus helping them make the right investment decisions, maximise their take-home salary, and plan their savings well in advance.

You've probably noticed that we provide a variety of payslip templates, including one specially designed for the full and final settlement. There are various components that should be present within a payslip to prove its credibility. Let's see how this can be easily achieved with our pre-existing templates.

Inside Zoho Payroll, click the Settings icon -> Payslip templates.

As you see in the images below, we have 6 templates, and they cover all the necessary information such as the organisation details, employee information, and the breakdown of the salary into earnings, deductions, and reimbursements.

How can the templates be customised further?

Click on the edit icon below any template and you will see different ways to customise it on the left side. Here are a few things you can do:

The organisation logo can be resized.
You can choose the information you want to display on the payslip.
You can even add up to 5 custom fields to the payslip.

When you're done making changes, click Save.

For example, we can add a custom field called Aadhar card to this template. When you come back to view this template again, you'll see the Aadhar card number field appear in it automatically. The full and final settlement payslip can be customised too—for instance, to edit the declaration section.

And that's how your payslips can be customised to look professional and reflect your brand voice.

3. Organisational announcements

There are various ways for you to communicate with your employees via Zoho Payroll, whether you're inviting new users or employees, or sending reminders for reimbursement proofs and tax declarations. But emails can be missed easily. So, if you want to make an organisation-wide announcement, how do you ensure that your employees don't miss it?

Zoho Payroll has an option for this.

You can now add a customisable banner message in the ESS portal. Here's how: