ANTE User ManualSetting Up Payroll
Before ANTE can compute a single payslip, it needs to know four things about your company: your payroll rules, your pay calendar, who gets paid together, and who signs off. This guide walks through that one-time setup in the order that works. Once it's done, every cutoff after that follows the same routine — How to Process Payroll.
Where Payroll Setup Lives
The settings in this guide are under HR → Payroll Setup and HR → HR Setup in the sidebar. You'll need administrator (or equivalent HR configuration) access to see these screens.
Step 1: Review HR Settings
HR → HR Setup → HR Settings holds the company-wide rules that payroll computation reads: time-tracker behavior, overtime and timekeeping policies, and payroll options. The defaults work for most companies — review each settings group once with your HR policy in hand before your first run.
Full reference: HR Settings.
Step 2: Create Your Cut-Off Schedule
A cutoff is the repeating date range a payroll period covers — for example, the 1st–15th and 16th–end of month for a semi-monthly company. ANTE generates the actual payroll periods from this schedule, so it must exist before anything can be computed.
- Open HR → Payroll Setup → Cut-Off Management.
- Click the add button and pick your frequency (for example semi-monthly, monthly, or weekly), then set the period boundaries and the processing/pay dates that follow each period.
- Save — the cutoff list now shows your schedule with its generated periods.
Details for every frequency: Cut-Off Management.
Step 3: Create a Payroll Group
A payroll group bundles the employees that get processed together: it ties a cutoff schedule to a set of pay rules (rates, day multipliers, government contribution treatment). Companies commonly keep one group per pay frequency — for example "Semi-Monthly Office Staff".
Field-by-field guide: Payroll Group.
Step 4: Assign Payroll Approvers
Payroll follows a review chain before anything is published — the people you name here are the ones who can move a cutoff from For Review through For Approval to Approved. Assign at least one approver so your first run doesn't stall waiting for a sign-off nobody can give.
See Payroll Approvers.
Step 5: Put Employees Into the Payroll Group
Payroll only computes employees that belong to a payroll group. Each employee's group lives on their record in Employee Records, in the work-assignment part of their profile alongside branch and schedule. New hires should get a payroll group as part of onboarding; for an initial setup, sweep through your active employees and confirm every one of them is assigned.
An employee with no payroll group simply never appears in a cutoff — if someone is "missing from payroll", this assignment is the first thing to check.
Managing employee records: Employee Records (HRIS).
Step 6 (Optional): Recurring Deductions and Leave Credits
Two more screens matter once the basics are in place:
- Deduction Plans — recurring per-employee deductions such as loans or company programs, scheduled across cutoffs. Deduction Plans
- Service Incentive Leaves — the leave-credit plans that govern accrual and renewal. Service Incentive Leaves
Verify: Your First Cutoff Appears
When the schedule, group, and assignments are in place, open HR → Payroll → Time Keeping. The Active tab should list your generated cutoff periods with an employee count — that's the sign payroll is wired up end to end.
- 1Active tab — upcoming and in-review periods
- 2Employees column — how many people the period covers
If the Employees column shows 0 for a period, the employees haven't been assigned to the payroll group that owns that cutoff — revisit Step 5.
Attendance itself arrives from your biometric devices or imports — see How Biometrics Connect to Timekeeping.
From here, follow How to Process Payroll for the per-cutoff routine: review attendance, compute, approve, and post.
How It Connects
Set up first
- Statutory Tables — supplies the tax, SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG rates that payroll applies once the basics here are in place.
- Holidays — tells payroll which days are holidays so they are paid and flagged correctly.
- Schedule Management — defines the weekly schedules employees work, which attendance is measured against.
Gets its data from
- Employee Records — holds each employee's salary rate, payroll group and contract; payroll can only include employees who are placed in a payroll group.
- Deduction — recurring deduction plans (loans, savings, and so on) that are taken out of each payslip.
Feeds into
- Payroll Time Keeping — the cutoffs you create here appear for attendance review as soon as they begin.
- Payroll Center — lists the same cutoffs and routes each one to the approvers you assigned.
- How to Process Payroll — the routine you repeat every cutoff once this setup is complete.