Lesson 4 — Payslip inputs: the eight codes that carry a variable month
Fixed pay lives on the contract. Everything that changes from month to month arrives as an input, and there are eight codes for it.
The obligation. The wage that has to be paid on time, and reported, is the wage actually earned — including overtime. That is why the module feeds the Wage Protection System file from the payslip's real figures: basic plus housing, transport and other allowances are reported as fixed income, everything else as variable, and the overtime column on the variable-pay record is filled from the overtime lines actually computed rather than left at zero. An input entered in the wrong place is therefore not only a payslip error. The SIF file itself is course 4.4.
The mental model. An input is a fact about the month, and the module supplies the price. The three overtime codes take a quantity — hours or days — and the rates from Lesson 2 and Lesson 3 do the rest. The five money codes take an amount you have already decided. Nothing here takes an absence: absences come from time off, and Lesson 5 explains why that separation matters more than it looks.
| Input | What you enter | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
OT_DAY_HRS |
Hours | Ordinary overtime hours |
OT_NIGHT_HRS |
Hours | Overtime hours between 22:00 and 04:00 |
OT_REST_DAYS |
Days | Rest days or public holidays worked |
BONUS |
Amount | Irregular earning |
COMM |
Amount | Irregular earning — commission |
ARREARS |
Amount | Irregular earning — a back payment |
OTHER_EARN |
Amount | Irregular earning — anything else |
OTHER_DED |
Amount | Any Article 25 deduction |
The click path. Set the employee's salary structure to UAE Monthly Payroll (Mainland), then create the payslip as usual and enter the month's variable items as payslip inputs, using the codes above. The module guide names the codes but does not describe a separate screen for them, so use the input area your payslip form already provides rather than looking for a UAE-specific one.
The worked example. August 2026 for our technician, as five inputs.
| Input | Value | What it represents |
|---|---|---|
OT_DAY_HRS |
10 | Ten hours of ordinary overtime |
OT_NIGHT_HRS |
6 | Six hours worked between 22:00 and 04:00 |
OT_REST_DAYS |
1 | One rest day worked |
BONUS |
1,000 | A quarterly production bonus |
OTHER_DED |
300 | Recovery of an overpayment made in July |
Those five inputs produce five lines on the payslip: three overtime earnings totalling AED 1,165, one bonus of AED 1,000 and one deduction of AED 300. The bonus carries no uplift and never should — BONUS, COMM, ARREARS and OTHER_EARN are amounts you have already decided, not quantities the module prices. OTHER_DED is the only deduction code among the eight, and it is the code the Article 25 cap measures.
The failure mode. Entering an absence as a negative earning, or as OTHER_DED. It produces the right net pay and the wrong payslip, in two ways at once. The deduction now counts toward the Article 25 cap, which it must not, and can push a lawful payslip over a limit it never came near. And the wage record loses the distinction between wage withheld from the employee and wage the employee never earned, which are different facts with different consequences. The test is simple: if the number you are about to type means "days not worked", you are on the wrong screen.