Your First Payslip on U HR: A Quick Guide for HR Managers

Generating your first payslip cycle on U HR is the moment when the HR system stops being a directory and starts being a payroll engine. The path from an empty workspace to a distributed payslip involves four configuration steps — Earnings & Deduction Rules, Working & Finance Info, Payslip generation, and Self-Service distribution — and one governance step that ties it all to Mudad-compatible WPS submissions and GOSI contribution schedules. This quick guide is written for the HR Manager who has already completed the fifteen-minute organization setup and is now ready to run the first monthly payroll cycle. We focus on the configuration choices that matter for Saudi and GCC employers: transparent calculation types, per-employee salary bases, IBAN validation, and the approval chain that prevents a miscalculated payslip from reaching an employee. By the end of this guide, you will have a repeatable monthly cycle that produces audit-ready payslips and the WPS file your bank accepts.

Why the first payslip matters #

The first payslip cycle is when configuration mistakes surface, and the cost of fixing them rises sharply after distribution. A misclassified allowance, an inverted deduction order, or a missing GOSI contribution will be visible to every employee the moment they open their payslip in the U HR Employee app — and the same error propagates into the WPS file that Mudad rejects. Saudi Labour Law requires payslips to itemize basic salary, housing, transportation, overtime, and deductions in a specific order, with GOSI contributions split between Saudi employees (including the SANED unemployment component) and non-Saudi employees (occupational-hazard coverage only). The first cycle is also when your auditor, your bank, and the MHRSD portal all look at your payroll data for the first time, so a clean first payslip sets the tone for every subsequent cycle. Treat the first cycle as a dress rehearsal: run it twice if needed, validate against a sample of contracts, and only distribute once every line item is reconciled. The five steps below walk through that dress rehearsal in order.

Step 1 — Configure Earnings & Deduction Rules #

The Earnings & Deduction Rules module in the U HR Manager app is where you define every component that can appear on a payslip — basic salary, housing allowance, transportation allowance, overtime, GOSI contribution, loan deduction, absence deduction, end-of-service accrual — and the calculation type behind each. Calculation types fall into three families: fixed-amount components (basic salary, fixed housing), percentage-of-base components (GOSI at 22% for Saudi employees, 2% for non-Saudi occupational hazard), and per-day components (overtime, daily-rate absence deductions). Each rule carries an effective date, a tax-and-contribution flag, and a display order that controls how it appears on the payslip itself. For Saudi employers, the most common rules to configure first are GOSI Saudi (9% employee + 9% employer for the social-insurance portion, plus 1% SANED), GOSI non-Saudi (2% occupational hazard, employer-only), and the WPS base salary that the Mudad SIF file expects to see as the first line of every payslip. Build these rules once, scoped to the Organization or per Company, and they will be inherited by every employee whose Working & Finance Info references them.

Step 2 — Set up Working & Finance Info for each employee #

Working & Finance Info is the employee-side module where each individual's salary components are entered and maintained. For every employee, you enter their basic salary, the allowances that apply to them (housing, transportation, any others per their contract), their GOSI category (Saudi or non-Saudi), their bank IBAN, and their contract start date — the last is what drives end-of-service-benefit accrual under Article 84 of the Saudi Labour Law. The Working & Finance Info screen also displays the live vacation balance and any active loan or advance deductions, so the HR Manager can see the full compensation picture without flipping between screens. The data entered here flows directly into the payslip generation step, so accuracy at this stage prevents downstream rework. A practical pattern is to upload Working & Finance Info for a sample of five employees first — one Saudi, one non-Saudi, one with an active loan, one with overtime, and one on a partial-month contract — and generate test payslips for them before committing the full workforce. This sample catches ninety percent of configuration errors before they scale to the entire payroll run.

Step 3 — Generate your first Payslips #

Payslip generation happens from the U HR Manager app and is scoped per Company and per pay period. You select the period (Hijri or Gregorian — U HR supports both, storing an absolute date under the hood), the Company, and the employee set; the system then computes each payslip by applying the Earnings & Deduction Rules to each employee's Working & Finance Info. The result is a per-employee payslip that itemizes basic salary, each earning, each deduction, GOSI contributions split by Saudi or non-Saudi category, and the net pay that will appear in the WPS file as the disbursement amount. Before approving the batch, the HR Manager reviews the totals — headcount, gross, total deductions, GOSI, and net — and a per-employee variance check that flags any payslip whose net differs from the previous cycle by more than a configurable threshold. This variance check is what catches misconfigured rules before they reach the approval workflow. Once the batch looks right, the HR Manager submits it for approval, which kicks off the governance step.

Step 4 — Route through approval workflows #

In a Saudi employer, a payslip batch should never go from generation to distribution without a second pair of eyes. The Approval Workflows feature in the Employee Manager app centralizes this governance: the HR Manager submits the batch, the line Finance Manager or CFO reviews and approves, and the batch then becomes distributable. Each approval carries a reviewer stamp, a timestamp, and an optional note — the audit trail that an MHRSD or GOSI auditor expects to see when reconstructing a pay cycle. For multi-company holdings, the approval chain can be scoped per Company, so the CFO of Company A approves Company A's batch and the group CFO sees all batches consolidated in their Employee Manager dashboard. The approval step is also where last-minute adjustments — a missed overtime claim, a corrected absence record — can be returned to the HR Manager for revision without re-running the entire batch. Treat this step as the last line of defense before the payslips reach employees and the WPS file reaches Mudad.

Step 5 — Distribute via the Self-Service portal #

Once approved, payslips are distributed to employees through the U HR Employee app's Payslips module. Each employee opens their Personal Workspace, taps the latest payslip, and sees the itemized breakdown with their net pay, GOSI contributions, and any deductions — all rendered in Arabic or English, RTL-native, with the line-item order matching Saudi Labour Law expectations. Notifications push to the employee's device the moment a new payslip is available, replacing the email-and-PDF pattern that most Saudi employers still rely on. The Self-Service distribution model has two compounding benefits: it eliminates the HR-desk query load ('can you re-send my payslip?'), and it creates a time-stamped audit record of when each employee accessed their payslip — useful evidence in any subsequent wage-protection dispute. For employees without a smartphone, the same payslips can be exported as PDFs or printed from the Employee Manager app, preserving accessibility without compromising the audit trail.

What to verify before WPS submission #

The payslip cycle and the WPS submission are two sides of the same coin: every payslip's net pay should equal the disbursement line in the Mudad SIF file. Before you submit the SIF file, verify five things: every employee's IBAN is valid and matches their bank's code; every Saudi employee's GOSI contribution is computed at the correct rate including SANED; every non-Saudi employee's contribution reflects the occupational-hazard-only rate; the contract salary matches the WPS base salary line on each payslip; and the total net disbursement in the SIF file matches the sum of approved payslips. Running through these five checks after the first cycle — and ideally before every cycle — is what keeps your establishment in good standing with MHRSD's wage-protection dashboard and avoids the service-block penalties that follow late or rejected WPS submissions.