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Loan / Advanced Salary

This guide covers loans, salary advances, and fines — money that moves outside the standard monthly pay cycle, paid out or recovered over time. For expense reimbursements and encashment, see Reimbursements & Encashment.

Purpose

A loan needs to be paid out once and recovered gradually; a fine needs to be recovered with no payout at all. This answers: "How does the system track money owed between the company and an employee, outside the regular payslip?"

Types

A loan account covers three cases:

  • A loan — a lump sum paid out to the employee, recovered in installments.
  • An advanced salary — the same mechanism, used for an early draw against future pay rather than a traditional loan.
  • A penalty / fine — a deduction-only record, with no payout at all. If Assets is installed, a fine can be linked to the specific asset record it relates to — for example, a damage charge tied to the item that was damaged.

Payout & Repayment Schedule

Creating a loan or advance automatically sets up:

  • Its payout — a one-time addition to an upcoming payslip, for the full loan amount.
  • Its full repayment schedule — a series of future deductions, one per installment, spaced one month apart starting from a chosen installment start date.

An individual installment amount can be manually adjusted later, redistributing the remainder across whatever installments haven't been paid yet. Progress can be tracked as a percentage — how many installments have actually been paid out of the total. Marking a loan settled cancels any installments still outstanding.

What Each User Sees

ActionEmployeeHR / Payroll Administrator
View their own loans/advances and repayment progress
Create, edit, or settle a loan/advance/fine

How Visibility Is Decided

  1. Ownership. An employee can always see their own loan and advance records and how much is left to repay.
  2. Permissions. Creating, editing, and settling a loan, advance, or fine requires the relevant permission — there's no reporting-manager visibility into a team's loans by default.

Customization Options

  • Installment count determines how many payslips the repayment is spread across.
  • Installment start date determines when recovery begins, independent of when the payout happens.
  • Individual installment amounts can be adjusted after the fact.

Good to Know

  • Loans pay out and recover through the payslip cycle, not immediately. The payout only actually reaches the employee once a payslip covering the relevant date is generated, and each installment only actually applies once a payslip covering its date is generated — see Payslips.
  • A loan's payout and its installments are just an allowance and a set of deductions under the hood. See Allowances and Deductions. They're automatically hidden from those modules' main lists, showing only on the specific employee's own record.
  • An already-settled loan, or one with installments already paid, can't be deleted — its history stays on file.
  • Repayments always land at the end of the month, regardless of when in the month the installment technically falls due.
Paid out, paid back, tracked either way.