HR and Payroll are two connected areas of IXL CORE that together run the people side of your business — from a job requisition and a shortlist of candidates, through onboarding a new hire and holding their record, on to leave, attendance, competencies and performance, and finally to running payroll each period and remitting the statutory returns. They sit on the same platform foundation as the rest of IXL CORE, so a closed payroll run turns into ledger entries in Accounting without anyone re-keying figures, and a signed offer becomes an employee record without re-entry.

This guide is a reference for what the two areas do and how the pieces fit together. It describes IXL CORE version 1.0, with statutory coverage for Kenya (KE) and South Africa (ZA).

Overview

At a glance, HR and Payroll cover these connected areas:

HR Records — the employee master (a workforce profile plus employment record), org chart and onboarding.
Recruitment — requisitions, campaigns, a candidate pipeline, interviews with scorecards, and offers that convert to a provisioned employee.
Leave — leave types, balances with accrual, requests and an approval queue, plus a leave calendar and liability reporting.
Attendance & timesheets — recorded attendance and timesheet entries with approvals.
Shifts & rosters — shift templates and roster assignments.
Job catalogue, competencies & KPIs — job profiles, a competency framework and a KPI/metric library that feed performance.
Training & discipline — training courses and records; disciplinary cases, actions and warnings.
Employee contracts — generate from a template and send for e-signature through the platform signing engine.
Performance — cycles, goals and reviews that rate against competencies and KPIs.
Payroll — components, payroll profiles, calendars, statutory rate packs, pay runs, payslips and analytics — run per entity and posted to the ledger.

Everything is scoped to your organisation and its entities, and every action is governed by permissions (see Access & permissions).

HR Records

An employee is the master record for a person on your books. In this build the record is split into a workforce profile (the person and their PII) and an employment record (their engagement — department, designation, status and terms), so the directory and the employment terms are held cleanly rather than jammed into one row. Both are strictly gated as PII, and every read and write is checked on the request, not merely hidden in the interface.

The area also holds an org chart view of reporting lines, and an onboarding checklist so a new starter’s first-day tasks are tracked to completion. Employees can be brought in through recruitment, imported in bulk, or created directly.

Recruitment

Recruitment takes a role from an approved need to a provisioned employee, without leaving the platform.

Requisitions — a request to hire that is raised, then approved or rejected through the platform approval service, so headcount is authorised before advertising.
Campaigns — a recruitment campaign is opened against an approved requisition and later closed; candidates apply into it.
Candidate pipeline — applications move through the pipeline; you progress or reject each one.
Interviews & scorecards — you schedule interviews and capture structured feedback on interview scorecards.
Offers — you generate an offer for a candidate; the candidate can accept or decline. On hire, the offer is converted into an employee record and the person is provisioned into the workforce automatically, so the candidate you interviewed becomes the employee you onboard with no re-entry.

Leave

The leave area manages time off end to end. You define leave types (annual, sick and so on), and the system maintains a balance per employee per type, built up through accrual runs. Employees submit leave requests; approvers work through an approval queue with a leave-decision step to approve or reject them. A leave calendar shows who is away and when, so cover is easy to plan.

HR reporting for leave includes leave usage, balances (with export), leave liability and a who’s out view — so the cost and coverage of time off are visible, not buried.

Attendance, timesheets, shifts & rosters

Attendance records capture presence, and timesheets record worked hours as timesheet entries submitted for approval. Alongside them, shift templates define recurring patterns and roster assignments place people onto shifts. Approved time feeds downstream so hours and overtime are accounted for correctly rather than reconciled by hand.

Job catalogue, competencies & KPIs

The job catalogue holds job profiles — versioned role definitions that carry the competencies and KPIs a role expects. The competency framework is a versioned library of competencies, and employees can be assessed against them through competency assessments. A separate KPI / metric library defines the measures a role is held to. Because job profiles, competencies and metrics are versioned, a change to a framework does not silently rewrite history — earlier assessments and reviews reflect the version that applied at the time.

Training & discipline

Training courses and training records track who has been trained on what, and expiring certifications surface in reporting. Discipline runs formal cases: a disciplinary case is opened and later closed, with actions and warnings recorded against it, so process is followed and evidenced.

Employee contracts

HR can author an employment contract from a template and send it for e-signature through the platform’s shared signing engine — HR builds no bespoke signing or PDF machinery of its own. Only a draft contract can be sent; sending mints a signing request to the employee (who needs a work email), and the contract is marked signed on completion. A contract can be voided, which also voids any open signature request. The same merge-token, PDF and signing foundations are reused across the platform, so a contract carries your branded letterhead.

Performance

Performance cycles frame a review period; within a cycle, employees have goals, and managers complete performance reviews that rate against the role’s competencies and KPIs carried from the job profile. A review is finalised (rolling the ratings up) and then acknowledged by the employee, so the outcome is agreed and on record rather than one-sided.

Employee self-service

Employees have a My HR self-service area. Through it a person can see their own record and requests, and view their own payslips without seeing anyone else’s — the sensitive split is built into the permission model, not left to the interface.

Payroll

Payroll is run per company entity, so a group with several legal entities runs each on its own terms. A pay run is created for a period and moves through a controlled lifecycle — draft → input → calculated → in review → approved → closed, with reject back for correction. Maker, checker and payer are captured separately (prepared, approved and released), and a void on a closed run is a two-step request-and-confirm control. At calculation the run freezes a snapshot, so a closed run reproduces identical figures forever.

Payroll is configured from a set of masters:

Payroll components — the versioned catalogue of earnings, deductions, benefits and statutory items that make up a payslip. Components are the platform master Payroll stewards.
Payroll profiles — how a given employee is paid (their components and terms).
Calendars — the pay periods for an entity.
Statutory rate packs — the rate tables the country packs read (see below).
Policy & GL mapping — a per-entity payroll policy plus the ledger accounts a run posts to.

Beyond the run itself, payroll supports variable inputs (period-specific additions and deductions, including a thirteenth-month generation), loan schedules for recovering advances or staff loans over time, a run cockpit for reviewing a run, payslip generation and download (also available to employees through self-service), a posting step that raises the payroll journal to the ledger through the shared posting engine, and payroll analytics.

Typical steps

Set up components, profiles, a calendar, the statutory rate pack and the policy/GL mapping for the entity once.
Go to Payroll → Pay Runs and create a run for the entity and period; capture any variable inputs.
Calculate the run and review it in the cockpit.
Submit for review, then approve; close the run and post it to the ledger.
Generate payslips; employees see theirs in self-service.

Statutory

Statutory calculation is country-driven through pluggable rate packs, so adding a country is a pack — there is no if(country) branching in the engine. This build ships packs for two countries:

Kenya (KE) — PAYE, NSSF, SHIF and the Housing Levy.
South Africa (ZA) — PAYE, UIF and SDL.

Rate packs are held as data: the system validates the shape of each rate table at write time (for example, a PAYE table must carry bands, an NSSF table its tiers), so a malformed pack is a clean, rejected update rather than silently-zero tax downstream. The values themselves are owned by a specialist and remain provisional pending sign-off — this documentation quotes no statutory rate. A statutory estimate helps model deductions ahead of a run.

Access & permissions {#access-and-permissions}

Every HR and payroll action is governed by a capability — viewing staff, managing salary, approving leave, running payroll, approving or voiding a run, and generating reports are each separate permissions, gated by both the WS04 access model and the WS12 commercial entitlement for the area. Capabilities are grouped into roles, and roles are assigned to users, so each person sees and does only what their role allows. Sensitive splits are built in — an employee can view their own payslips through self-service without seeing anyone else’s — and operator god-mode still passes through the same gate. Every rule is enforced on each request, not merely hidden in the interface.

How HR & Payroll connect

HR and Payroll are not islands. On the shared platform foundation:

A new hire flows through once — an accepted offer is hired into an employee record and provisioned into the workforce, slotted into a department and designation, ready for leave and payroll without being re-created anywhere.
Contracts, signing and documents are shared — employment contracts reuse the platform’s signing engine, PDF rendering and branded letterhead rather than a bespoke HR copy.
Time and leave feed pay — approved timesheets and leave are already accounted for by the time you run payroll.
Payroll posts to Accounting — a run is posted through the shared posting engine against the entity’s GL mapping, so wages, deductions and employer costs land in the ledger with no separate entry.

That connection is the point: you hire and manage a person once, and the rest of the business — the org chart, their leave and time, their competencies and performance, their pay and the books — stays in step.

HR & Payroll