Payroll that refuses to invent a number
Most school payroll is rebuilt every month in a spreadsheet, from somebody's memory of who was absent. It usually produces a number. Whether that number is right is a separate question, and nobody can answer it afterwards.
SkoolBook's payroll is built around the opposite instinct. It computes from the employee's own salary structure and their actual attendance — and where either is missing, it stops, names the people it cannot pay, and tells you what to fix. A run that produces nothing and explains why is worth more than one that produces a confident figure nobody can defend.
What you get
An employee record that extends your staff list
Departments, designations, employment type, joining and confirmation dates, documents with expiry tracking, and an append-only employment history. It builds on the staff records you already have rather than asking you to keep a second list.
Biometric punches, rolled up into days
Punches import from your device and become one status per employee per day. It refuses to run without a work calendar — because without one it cannot tell a Sunday from an absence, and would dock every weekend A recorded punch is evidence: its time, direction and device cannot be edited afterwards, and once it is attributed to an employee that attribution cannot be quietly moved to someone else.
PF, ESI and professional tax as configuration, not code
Rates and thresholds live in a slab table your accountant can adjust. The PF ceiling applies to the wage, ESI stops at its threshold rather than tapering, and Telangana and Andhra slabs ship seeded — with a note that your accountant should confirm them.
It refuses on named grounds
No salary structure, attendance not fully recorded, or a statutory component with no slab — each is listed with the employees affected, and each is re-checked when you lock the run rather than trusted from the last preview.
Payslips that still say the same thing next year
Each line snapshots its own breakdown when the run is locked. A payslip issued in August reads identically in March, because it is a record of what was paid rather than a fresh calculation.
Loans recovered once, at the right moment
A staff loan's instalment appears on the payslip when the run is computed, but the balance only falls when the run is marked paid — so previewing a draft a dozen times cannot quietly shrink somebody's loan.
How it works
- 1
Build the employee master
Existing staff already have employee records; you fill in departments, designations and joining dates.
- 2
Get attendance in
Import biometric punches or mark days by hand, then roll them up. Days nobody has accounted for are reported separately — they are neither present nor absent.
- 3
Set salary structures
Define each employee's components once. Statutory items resolve against the slab table rather than being retyped.
- 4
Compute, and read the refusals
The run tells you what it could not do and who it affects, while it is still a draft.
- 5
Lock, approve, pay
Locking fixes the figures; the managing director approves; marking it paid generates the bank advice and posts any loan recoveries.
Frequently asked
Can someone edit a biometric punch to change what a person is paid?
No. The punch log is append-only: the time, direction, device and employee code of a recorded punch cannot be altered after the fact, and once a punch has been attributed to an employee that attribution cannot be silently reassigned. Corrections happen as visible adjustments to the attendance day, where they can be seen and questioned — not by rewriting the underlying evidence.
Does it calculate TDS?
No, and that is deliberate. TDS needs investment declarations, HRA exemption, previous employment, Chapter VI-A and a regime election — none of which a school ERP holds. A figure from income slabs alone would be wrong for almost every employee, on a payslip they plan around. You enter what your accountant advises, and the payslip says that is what happened.
What happens to an employee with no salary structure?
They are excluded from the run and named in the response. Nothing is assumed for them. This is the specific behaviour that replaced a payroll which used to show a confident monthly figure for staff it had no salary data for at all.
Can it handle staff loans and salary advances?
Yes. You record the loan, it is approved and disbursed, and the instalment is recovered from each payroll run until the balance clears. The register shows the amount repaid against the outstanding balance, and flags any disagreement between the two rather than quietly correcting it.
Is biometric attendance available for students too?
No. Biometric ingest is for staff. Student attendance is marked by the class teacher, section by section.