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Payroll in OnTime is a cycle: one run per month, moving through five stages in order. It reads attendance rather than owning it, so most of what determines the numbers has already happened before the cycle starts.

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The five stages

Each stage is gated on the one before it. Attempting them out of order is refused — you cannot calculate a cycle whose inputs are not marked complete, and you cannot disburse one that has not been approved.
Disburse is the point of no return. It creates the Payslip rows employees see and marks the cycle disbursed. There is no un-disburse.

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What freezing actually does

Freezing sets a flag on every day record in the month, for every employee. From that moment:
  • New punches for those dates are refused.
  • Approving a regularization that would rewrite one of those days is refused, and the whole approval rolls back.
  • Approving overtime on one of those days is likewise refused.
Clear your regularization and overtime queues before you freeze. An approver hitting a wall of refusals after the freeze is the most common payroll-week friction.
An administrator can still lift the freeze on an individual day through a day override — but that is a deliberate, audited exception, not the normal path.

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Recalculating

You can calculate more than once. Recalculating rebuilds every run line from current data — and clears the approval, because the numbers that were approved no longer exist.
Adding a line-level override does not automatically recalculate. The review screen warns you when overrides exist on an already-calculated cycle; you have to re-run Calculate for them to take effect.

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Who can do what

Both sit with the HR and Admin presets. Managers and employees have neither — employees see their own payslips through pay:read, which is a different key. Every stage transition is written to the audit log.

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Where to go

Components

The earnings and deductions that make up a payslip.

Compensation

Per-employee salary structure and revision history.

Running a cycle

The month-end runbook, stage by stage.

Overrides

Correcting a single line before the maths runs.

Payslips

The admin browser and what employees see.