Zoho Payroll: Product Updates - July 2024

At Zoho Payroll, we’re committed to continually improving our software to meet your needs better. We strive to innovate, ensuring our payroll solutions are functional and user-friendly, providing you with an unparalleled experience.

This July, we are excited to share the latest enhancements we’ve rolled out over the past month. Our team has diligently worked on introducing the calculate earnings with Gross-based custom formulas for India and UAE, Off Cycle Payroll for the US, Employee Bank Account Creation for UAE, along with several other improvements to your payroll processes.

Select Different Bank Accounts for Recording Payroll Payments (India, US, and UAE)

This new feature allows you to select different bank accounts while recording payments for all or a group of employees in a payroll.

Why Businesses Need This Feature:

Budget Control: It allows for better tracking and management of budgets for different departments or projects. Each account can be monitored to ensure spending is within allocated budgets.
Escrow Accounts: Sometimes used to manage funds for specific purposes, such as bonuses or special project payments, ensuring that these funds are kept separate until they are disbursed.

If your organisation uses different bank accounts to process payments for similar reasons as mentioned above, you can use this feature.

Country	Feature Availability
India & US	Available only if you've integrated with Zoho Books
UAE	Can create multiple bank accounts in Settings > Bank Account and record payments without Zoho Books integration

Select Different Bank Accounts While Recording Payment

After recording payments, you will see a summary listing the paid through accounts, payment methods, and associated employees and amounts for each paid through account:

Payments Made Accounts Insight

If you delete the recorded payment once all the employees have been paid, all the paid through accounts information will also be deleted.

Employer Bank Accounts Creation (UAE)

Suppose you have employees in different departments who need to be paid from different bank accounts. With this feature, you can easily manage and assign the appropriate bank accounts along with their respective routing numbers for each group for your SIF file generation.

If your organisation is integrated with Zoho Books, all associated bank accounts will automatically populate here.

Once you have created multiple bank accounts, you can mark the most used bank account as primary. This primary bank account will be the default bank account used for SIF file generation.

Here’s how to manage your bank accounts in Zoho Payroll: Navigate to Settings > Bank Accounts and select the relevant bank account or create a new one.

Add Multiple Employer Bank Accounts

Calculate Earnings with Gross-Based Custom Formulas (India, and UAE)

Our new feature allows you to calculate employee earnings based on their gross pay—comprising fixed earnings minus any deductions per month.

Previously, gross calculations had to be applied manually to select employees. Now, this update enables you to include the gross component in custom formulas for the earnings and associate them with all employees or specific groups, ensuring uniform calculations throughout your organisation.

Gross = Earnings + Flexible Benefit Plan + Reimbursement

The gross pay amount specified for the respective employee will be used for calculation of the component mentioned in the custom formula.

Here’s how you can set it up in Zoho Payroll:

Navigate to Settings and select Salary Components.
Click Add Component and select Earning.
Choose the Custom Formula option for the variable earning and include 'Gross' as a component.

Gross Component in Custom Formulas

Off Cycle Payroll (US)

Off-cycle payroll allows you to issue pay stubs to employees outside of the regular pay schedule. This feature is essential for handling payments along such as ad-hoc incentives, commissions, or overtime pay that aren’t included in the standard payroll cycle. You can also choose to process the off-cycle payrolls based on the pay schedule of your choice along with benefits and deductions associated to employees.

Sample Scenario: Imagine you want to reward a department for exceptional performance with an ad-hoc incentives. With the Off Cycle Payroll feature, you can quickly process this payment outside of the regular pay schedule.

How to Create Off Cycle Payroll:

Go to Pay Runs.
Click Create Pay Run and select Select Off Cycle Pay Run.

Once you create the off-cycle payroll, you can add eligible employees to the off-cycle pay run and specify their earnings.

Off Cycle Payroll for US edition

You can also visit the What's New timeline for information about our previous feature updates and enhancements.

That's all for now! We're always eager to hear your feedback and suggestions. If you have any feature requests, please share them in the comments below.

For assistance, contact us at support@zohopayroll.com. Stay tuned for more updates from Zoho Payroll!

With a shared purpose,
The Zoho Payroll Team