Lesson 9 — The bilingual payslip, read in three parts
The sheet is the part of this module your employees actually see, and it is designed around who reads it rather than around who configured it.
The obligation. This one is practical rather than textual. A UAE payslip is read by an Arabic-speaking employee and filed by an English-speaking accountant, from the same page, and both of them need to be able to add up the column in front of them and get the number printed at the bottom of it.
The mental model. The sheet is bilingual by design: every label carries English and Arabic together. It is not a translated document, and you do not switch language to get the other half — there is no other half, because both are already there. Read it in three parts: the two columns, the net, and everything printed below the net.
The click path. Employees → Payslips → Print → Payslip (UAE). A payslip computed on a non-UAE structure prints the standard payroll payslip instead; nothing is forced through a UAE sheet that does not belong on one.
The worked example. August 2026 for our technician, complete. Everything in it comes from a rule taught in one of the previous eight lessons.
| Earnings | Amount |
|---|---|
| Basic salary | AED 7,200 |
| Housing allowance | AED 3,300 |
| Transport allowance | AED 1,500 |
| Ordinary overtime, 10 hours at AED 37.50 | AED 375 |
| Night overtime, 6 hours at AED 45 | AED 270 |
| Rest-day work, 1 day | AED 520 |
| Bonus | AED 1,000 |
| Total earnings | AED 14,165 |
| Deductions | Amount |
|---|---|
| Sick leave at half pay, 2 days at AED 200 | AED 400 |
| Recovery of an overpayment, Article 25 | AED 300 |
| Total deductions | AED 700 |
| Net pay | AED 13,465 |
Net pay is earnings minus deductions and nothing else. Of the AED 700 deducted, the Article 25 cap measures AED 300, because the sick-leave line is an absence rather than a withholding — Lesson 6. And the printed totals are the sums of the printed lines, so an employee who adds the column reaches AED 14,165 exactly as the sheet does.
Below the net. Employer contributions print underneath net pay, outside every total above, under a label stating that they are not deducted from the employee's salary — because they are not. An employer's pension share is the employer's cost, and it is shown so the employee can see what is being paid on their behalf. Our technician is an expatriate with no scheme, so this payslip carries no employer contribution; course 4.2 covers what goes into this block and for whom.
Three further blocks appear only when they apply.
- Outstanding loans, where the loan module is installed and the employee has approved loans with a balance. With the loan-accounting bridge they are summed into one company-currency figure; without it each loan is listed in its own currency, because nothing then guarantees they share one.
- Unrecovered advances, where the advance module is installed. Recovery is all-or-nothing per advance, so an advance is either listed in full or not listed at all.
- Accrued end of service, which reads the last posted provision run and always shows the date it was taken as at. That date is not decoration: the figure is what was booked, so after a pay cut it can be higher than what would be owed today. Where no provision has been posted, the block says so in one line rather than showing a blank, because a blank cannot be told from "nothing accrued". Companies on a funded scheme get no block at all.
The company TRN is printed by the standard document header, taking its label from the country's own tax label, so it appears correctly in both languages without the payslip restating it.
The honest limits, collected in one place so nobody discovers them at month end.
- It prices the tier you record and does not split the 15/30/45 sick ladder, and it does not enforce leave eligibility.
- It stores GCC home-currency salary caps for reference and does not apply them, because applying them needs an agreed currency-conversion rule.
- It covers federal GPSSA only, not Abu Dhabi's ADPF or Sharjah's SSF.
- It seeds no accounting entries for the UAE rules — you map debit and credit accounts yourself, per company, which is course 4.5.
- It does not implement Article 51 at all: the gratuity comes from the End of Service engine, which is course 4.3.
The failure mode. Somebody asks for "the payslip in Arabic" and a well-meaning colleague changes a language setting looking for a document that does not exist. Answer it once, in writing, in your payroll procedure: the UAE payslip is bilingual on every label and there is no second version of it. The other one to watch for is an empty space where the accrued end-of-service block should be. The module never leaves that space empty — it prints one line saying no provision has been posted. If you genuinely see no block at all, the company is on a funded scheme, and that is a different conversation entirely.