What's New in Zoho Payroll [Indian Edition]: June 2020

Hello users,

We hope all of you are staying safe in this crisis and are able to settle into some form of routine. Here, at Zoho Payroll, we've been keeping ourselves busy by coming up with a variety of features and updates. Read on to know all about them.

Custom employee fields

We have introduced custom fields for the Employee module to enable you to collect and store additional information about your employees. You can collect details like Aadhaar number, marital status, etc from your employees. This information will be available in the employee portal as well. To create, edit, disable, or delete a custom field, read our help document.

Once you create a custom field, it will be available in every employee’s profile under Personal Information > Other Details.

Zoho Payroll - Zoho People field mapping

While enabling the Zoho Payroll - Zoho People integration, you can now map the payroll fields with the fields in the employee forms of Zoho People and sync employee information easily. Apart from the mandatory fields, you can also map the custom fields.

Employee information includes:

Basic Information

There are 13 fields that can be synced under this section: First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Employee Number, Gender, Date of Joining, Designation, Work Email, Mobile Number, Department, Work Location, Date of Termination, and Status.

Personal Information

There are 9 fields that can be synced under this section: Personal Email, Date of Birth, Father's Name, PAN Number, Personal Address Line1, Personal Address Line2, Personal City, Personal State Code, and Personal Postal Code.

Payment Information

There are 6 fields that can be synced under this section: Payment Code, Bank Holder Name, Bank Name, Account Number, Routing Number, and Account Type. For this section, you have to map either all the fields or none of the fields to proceed with the integration. If you don't map the information when you set up, you can directly import the fields in Zoho Payroll.

Note: The default fields will be mapped automatically and you cannot edit them.

The fields that will be populated from Zoho People can be found under Zoho People > Settings > Customization > Forms > Employee. You can also add custom fields to this section.

New EPF rates

One of the financial measures announced by the Government of India in response to the COVID-19 crisis is the reduction in PF contribution rate from 12% to 10%. Employers and employees can contribute 10% of PF wages towards the EPF for May, June, and July. This provision will enable employees to have more cash in hand during the crisis.

You can directly enable the new EPF rate of 10% for all employees from Settings > Statutory Components. Or you can import individual EPF rates of either 12% or 10% as desired by the employees under Employees > Import Data > Employee Statutory Details.

For further details, read our post on the new EPF rates.

Free plan in Zoho Payroll

Zoho Payroll caters to all types of businesses right from small businesses to large corporations. Small businesses can benefit a great deal from adopting the right technology to run their day-to-day payroll operations. As they grow, this can help them continue to manage their payroll process easily, since they're used to it from the beginning. Keeping this in mind, we've launched the Free Plan for organisations with 10 employees or less working from a single work location.

Once you've completed your trial run, you will be prompted with options to move to the Free Plan or upgrade your subscription.

Reminders for IT declaration & POI

Employees with portal access are required to submit their investment declarations and proofs each month. You can now remind your employees via email to submit their IT declarations and investment proofs before the deadline is up. You can send up to 5 reminders to your employees before you lock the IT/POI submission. Enable these reminders under Settings > Preferences > Income Tax Declaration. Whenever you release the IT declaration/POI submissions, emails will be automatically sent to employees for whom portal access is enabled.

To enable reminders for POI submission, go to Settings > Preferences > Proof of Investments.

Loan opening balance

For loans disbursed and partially repaid in the prior payroll, you can now include the loan amount and perquisite balance for the remaining repayments and track them in Zoho Payroll.

After adding prior payroll details, add the Loan Opening Balance, and Perquisite Opening Balance along with the loan details. Once this is done, continue the repayments as post-tax deductions until the loan is fully repaid.

Monthly split-up of the HRA calculation in TDS slip

House Rent Allowance (HRA) is one of the partially tax-exempted allowances that employees can claim if they live in a rented accommodation.

The deduction available is taken as the least of the following:

Actual HRA received; or
50% of Basic Salary for those living in metro cities (40% for non-metros); or
Actual rent paid minus 10% of Basic Salary

Once an employee submits the necessary proofs, HRA will be calculated for the financial year based on the above factors and deducted from the taxable income.

Now, you can find the monthly split-up of the House Rent Allowance (HRA) at the end of the monthly tax calculation in the employee's TDS slip.

Investment declaration for prior payroll terminated employee

You can now declare investments for employees terminated in the prior payroll. These investment details are essential while generating Form 16. To declare investments for prior payroll terminated employees:

Go to the Employees module.
Select Terminated Employees from the dropdown menu.
Select the employee for whom you want to add investment details.
Within the employee's profile, click the Investments tab.
Click Submit IT Declaration and declare the employee's investments.
Click Save.

Alternatively, you can import the investment details of one or more terminated employees. To do this:

Go to the Employees module.
Click the More icon and select Import Data.
From the dropdown menu, select the type of investment (Section 6A, HRA Details, Let-out property details, etc.)
Upload the file containing the investment details and click Next.
Map the respective fields and click Next.
Review the field mapping and click Import.

Once you've imported these details, you can use them to generate Form 16.

Arrear PF reports

Arrear PF reports can be used to review the PF credited as arrears after salary revision. To access the report:

Go to the Reports module.
Select EPF-ECR Report under Statutory Reports.
Select the month for which you want to view the report.
In the top right corner, click View Arrear EPF-ECR Report.

Let us know how these features are useful to you and what other new features you'd like to see. If you need any assistance using Zoho Payroll, drop us an email at support@zohopayroll.com.

Sincerely,

Supriya A

The Zoho Payroll Team

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