Running clients' payroll as separate employers

How a South African firm runs several clients' payroll in Achekam, each as its own employer, with separate preparers and approvers and payslips by e-mail.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa

A payroll bureau inside an accounting practice lives with a particular risk: many small employers, run by the same few people, often on the same day of the month. A guesthouse pays weekly, a dental practice monthly, a construction subcontractor fortnightly. Each has its own allowances, its own deductions and its own bank. Mix up one employer's settings with another's, and someone is paid wrongly, in public, with the firm's name on the payslip.

There is a second risk peculiar to bureaus. The firm prepares the payroll and is often also the party that signs it off before the client's money moves. Unless the firm separates those duties internally, nobody independent has looked at the run.

Achekam's payroll is built for South African employers and handles both risks in the same way: keep every employer separate, and keep preparing and approving in different hands.

One employer for each client, and one for the firm

A firm sets up its own staff and each client whose payroll it runs as separate employers. Each employer has its own employees, earnings, deductions and pay settings, under PAYROLL > Employers, Employees and Earnings & Deductions.

The separation is not cosmetic. An earning code created for the dental practice does not appear on the guesthouse's payslips, and a pay setting changed for one client does not move another's. The firm's own payroll sits beside the clients' as one more employer with its own settings.

Importing people: all rows or none

Most new clients arrive with a spreadsheet of employees from their previous provider. People can be imported from a spreadsheet, and the import writes rows only when every row passes. If one row fails, none are written.

That is stricter than many imports, and it is the right choice for payroll. A partial import leaves a client with some employees loaded and others missing, which is exactly the state in which someone is left off a run. Fix the failing rows in the spreadsheet and import again.

Monthly, fortnightly or weekly runs

Payroll staff can run payroll monthly, fortnightly or weekly, so each client keeps its own pay cycle. Each run works out gross pay, PAYE, UIF and SDL for every employee, and it can be recalculated as often as needed until it is approved. On approval, variable inputs such as overtime are frozen, and from then on the run can be corrected only by a correction run.

Before the first run for any employer, the firm must confirm the year's tax table. Achekam's PAYE calculation has no tax rates written into it, and a pay run is refused until a named person at the firm has confirmed that year's table, with a note of what they checked. The calculator also has limits; lump sums without a directive, backdated pay and retrenchment packages produce warnings, not figures. Those cases are covered in what the payroll calculator will not work out.

Preparer and approver are different people

Three rules enforce separation of duties:

• The person who prepared a pay run cannot approve it.
• Nobody can approve a run that pays themselves.
• A change to a person's bank account must be verified by a second person.

Only users with the Partner, Admin, Payroll, PayrollAdmin or FinanceManager roles can change payroll. At approval, any unverified bank accounts are listed and left off the bank file. That rule is an important defence against the familiar fraud in which an e-mail "from an employee" asks for salary to go to a new account.

For a small bureau with two payroll staff, the practical result is a pairing: each prepares some employers and approves the other's.

Leave, advances and claims

Bureau clients ask about leave balances more than anything else. Achekam keeps leave as a ledger of accruals and days taken for each employer, using the Basic Conditions of Employment Act minimums as a floor that the employer may raise. The Department of Employment and Labour's basic guide to annual leave sets out the annual leave minimum, when leave must be granted and when it may be paid out. Nobody can approve their own leave. Advances and loans are recovered from later runs, and staff claims and changes to an employee's details are approved by someone other than the person who made them.

Keeping leave as a ledger rather than a single balance means that when a client disputes an employee's days, the bureau can show each accrual and each day taken, not just the figure left over.

Payslips by e-mail for client employees

Achekam produces each payslip as a PDF and e-mails it, one person per message, with a record of every send. Sending automatically on approval is off until the firm switches it on for an employer, so a bureau can start by sending manually while it builds confidence in a new client's set-up.

Client employees have no Achekam login, so their payslips reach them by e-mail only. The firm's own staff are different: they see their own payslips, IRP5s and leave under HOME > My Payslips & Leave.

Who does what in a bureau

For an approved run, Achekam produces a bank payment file, either in FNB's CSV template or as a CSV in a column order the firm sets up for its bank, to be imported into online banking. Achekam does not pay anyone. Posting the wages journal into the client's books has its own conditions, set out in posting a client's wages journal. Before year end, see clearing missing employee details.

Set up your two most different clients first, one weekly and one monthly, run each through a full cycle with a separate approver, and only then move the rest of the book across.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.