ANTE User ManualProcess Your First Payroll
Take one cutoff period from raw attendance to posted payslips: review timekeeping, compute salaries, walk the cutoff through review and approval, publish it, and hand out payslips.Before You Start
Payroll computes from configuration that must already be in place. If this is the company's very first run, complete Setting Up Payroll first — in particular:
- A cut-off schedule, so payroll periods are generated at all.
- At least one payroll group, with every employee assigned to one on their employee record.
- At least one payroll approver, or the cutoff stalls waiting for a sign-off nobody can give.
- Company-wide HR Settings reviewed against your policy — they are the rules computation reads.
Go to Manpower → Payroll → Time Keeping. The Active tab lists the cutoff periods still open for attendance review, with their Start Date, End Date, Cutoff Code, Process Date, employee count, Period, and Status (Current, On Process, or Past Due).
The In Process / Posted tab holds cutoffs already submitted for payroll — those open read-only.
If the Employees column shows 0, nobody is assigned to the payroll group that owns that cutoff. Fix the assignments on the employee records before going further.
- 1Active tab — cutoffs still open for editing
- 2Employees — how many people the period covers
- 3Status — Current, On Process, or Past Due
Time Keeping does not capture attendance itself — it reads the raw clock logs and approved filings already in the system and computes work, late, undertime, night differential, and overtime from them.
If punches arrive from biometric devices, they are already there — see Biometrics & Timekeeping. If not, import them at Time Importation: choose the import template and import mode, download the template, upload your Excel or CSV file, review the validation results, then Process Import.
Click the cutoff row to open its Payroll Timesheet. Every employee in the period gets a row with Attendance, Leave, Work, Break, Late, Undertime, ND, OT, OT Approval, OT Approved, ND OT, and Total Hours — with a totals row across the top.
Use Search employees and the Branches filter to narrow the list. Anyone showing No Data / Click to process has not been computed yet — click the row to compute them, or use Recompute All to redo everyone at once (it runs in the background and can take a while).
- 1Cut-off period, processing date, and period type
- 2Totals row — the whole cutoff at a glance
- 3Submit for Payroll — computes salaries and locks attendance
Click an employee to open their day-by-day timesheet, then click a day for the Day Detail tabs: Time Breakdown, Day Details, Computed Summary, Shift Details, and Filings. From the Filings tab you can Approve or Reject that day's pending Overtime, Leave, Schedule Adjustment, Official Business, and Certificate of Attendance filings.
Right-click a day row for its corrections:
- Recompute Time — redo just that day.
- Modify Time — override the computed work hours, night differential, approved overtime, late, and undertime.
- Adjust Shift — put a different shift on that day.
- Enable Day / Disable Day and the holiday-pay overrides for rest days and holidays.
Overtime that is For Approval can also be approved straight from the FA column on the daily table if you hold the overtime-approval permission.
When attendance is right, click Submit for Payroll at the top of the timesheet and confirm. Salaries are computed for every employee and the cutoff moves into the For Review stage of the Payroll Center.
Submitting freezes the cutoff's attendance. Modify Time, Recompute, shift and holiday overrides, manual raw logs, and time imports are all blocked for those dates until the cutoff is sent back — see Timekeeping Freeze.
Go to Manpower → Payroll → Payroll Center. The stepper on the left holds the workflow stages — For Review, For Approval, Approved, Posted, plus Rejected when something has been returned. Each cutoff appears as a card with its date range, pay date, and Gross and Net totals.
Click the card to open the Payroll Summary: one row per employee with Basic Salary, Late, Undertime, Absent, Basic Pay, Allowance Pay, Holiday Pay, Overtime Pay, Night Diff Pay, Rest Day Pay, Manual Earnings, SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, Tax, Loans, Manual Deductions, and Net Pay. Click any row for that employee's Salary Computations Details, where you can Recompute, Adjust Salary, Add Allowance, or Add Deduction.
Employees separated during the period sit in a separate Separated Employees (On Hold) section — computed, but held from release.
- 1Stages — For Review, For Approval, Approved, Posted
- 2Cutoff card — click to open the Payroll Summary
- 3Gross and Net totals for the cutoff
On the Payroll Summary of a For Review cutoff you have three actions: Re-Compute (redo every employee after a correction), Return to Timekeeping (unfreeze attendance so it can be edited), and Submit for Approval.
When you submit, ANTE checks for unapproved filings. If employees still have pending Overtime, Leave, Certificate of Attendance, Official Business, or Schedule Adjustment filings, a warning lists them and those filings will not be included. Tick the acknowledgement to proceed anyway, or go back to Time Keeping and approve them first.
A filing that was submitted while the cutoff was open but only approved after it locked is not lost — its pay is added to the employee's next open cutoff as a Carry-over line.
Open the For Approval stage and click the cutoff card. An authorized approver now has two choices on the Payroll Summary: Return to Review to send it back for corrections, or Approve to move it to the Approved stage.
This is the last comfortable point to catch a mistake — corrections after posting need the posting reversed first.
Open the Approved stage, click the cutoff card, and click Publish. The confirmation warns that a published payroll cannot be modified; confirm and the cutoff moves to Posted.
From a posted cutoff you can use Bank File Writers to generate per-bank payment files (each needs a Payroll Code and Batch number; employees with no bank details appear under a No Bank tab), and Export the summary as CSV, Excel, or Excel (Detailed).
Payslips become available only after posting — open Payslip Center under Manpower → Reports, pick the Cutoff Code and Cutoff Period, and review or save each employee's payslip as a PDF. Employees see their own under the Payslip Summary widget on their Dashboard.
Need to fix a posted cutoff? Cancel Posted reverses the posting (an OTP confirmation is required) and returns it to For Review.
Where to Go Next
- How to Process Payroll — the full reference, including rejected cutoffs and importing posted payroll from a file.
- Payroll Time Keeping — every timesheet action, override, and the timekeeping freeze rules in detail.
- Payroll Center — the workflow stages, bank files, and reversing a posted payroll.
- File and Approve a Leave Request — clear the filings that would otherwise hold up your next cutoff.