The monthly run

Opening, computing, correcting, locking and dispatching a Lohnabrechnung.

The monthly Lohnabrechnung is the unit of payroll work. A run has exactly two states, and the transition between them is one-way.

State	Meaning
OPEN	Line items can be recomputed and corrections applied.
CLOSED	Locked. No edits. The line items are the auditable record.

The cycle

1. Open the run

   Choose the month and the legal entity. The run picks up every employee active in that month, including joiners and leavers with their partial periods.

   Permission: tenant:payroll-run:edit (ADMIN+).

2. Compute

   The engine builds each employee’s line items from the employment period in force, the recurring earnings, the recorded absences, the time entries for hourly staff, the Lohnart catalog and the insurance configuration.

   Compute is repeatable. Corrected an absence? Recompute — the run is OPEN, and the result is deterministic.

3. Review

   Two views: the Übersicht across all employees, and the per-employee detail down to individual line items. HR staff can see both (tenant:payroll-run:view) even though they cannot change them.

   This is where you check the month-on-month deltas — a salary that moved without a corresponding change on the employee record is the thing to catch here.

4. Correct

   On an OPEN run you can add manual Korrekturen — a one-off earning, a retroactive adjustment, an extra deduction — each against a Lohnart so it books and declares correctly. You can also set the per-employee free text (individueller Text) that appears on the payslip, and adjust the vacation counters shown there.

5. Lock

   Locking closes the run permanently. Permission: tenant:payroll-run:lock (ADMIN+).

   A locked run cannot be reopened. A correction after locking is made in a subsequent run as a retroactive adjustment — which is exactly how Swiss payroll corrections are supposed to work, and why the lock is a hard boundary rather than a soft one.

6. Dispatch payslips

   Payslip PDFs are e-mailed to employees. Each dispatch is tracked per employee — PENDING while the send is in flight, then SENT or FAILED — so a failed send is visible and re-sendable rather than lost.

   Permission: tenant:payroll-run:dispatch (ADMIN+). Mailing a payslip ships financial data outside the system, so it sits at the same tier as locking.

What the engine computes

For each employee, in order:

1. Gross — salary from the employment period, prorated for partial months, plus recurring earnings, hourly time, and one-off corrections.
2. Absence effects — unpaid absence reduces the base; illness and accident route through their own Lohnarten with the salary-continuation entitlement applied.
3. Bases — the AHV, ALV, UVG, KTG and BVG bases, each assembled from the Lohnarten flagged as belonging to it.
4. Deductions — social insurance at the configured rates, split employer/employee.
5. Quellensteuer — where applicable, from the cantonal tariff for the employee’s profile.
6. Net — and the payment amount, which may differ where there are non-cash items.

All of it in decimal arithmetic, rounded to rappen only at the boundary.

Bulk exports

A locked run produces the month’s artefacts in one action (tenant:payroll-run:export, ADMIN+):

• Sammel-PDF — every payslip in one file.
• Buchungsjournal — the journal entries for accounting.
• Rekapitulation — the month’s totals per Lohnart and per account.

These aggregate every employee’s compensation, which is why they sit at the same permission tier as locking and dispatch.

Lohnkonten

Per-employee and aggregate year-to-date payroll accounts, derived from the line items. Read-only (tenant:lohnkonto:view, HR_STAFF+) — they mutate nothing and HR needs them for monthly review and for answering employee questions.

Corrections after locking

Situation	What to do
Wrong salary, run still open	Fix the employment period and recompute.
Wrong salary, run locked	Add a retroactive correction to the next run.
Absence recorded late	Next run picks it up as a retroactive adjustment.
Employee left, discovered after lock	Retroactive correction plus a deregistration in the next declaration.
Payslip mailed to the wrong address	Correct the record, resend from the dispatch view.