Making a payslip by hand when you only have a handful of staff
A payslip is a short document with a demanding reader: the person whose wages it describes. This piece explains what each panel of the payslip maker does, why employer contributions are printed but never subtracted, how the year-to-date column is kept correct from one month to the next, and what the tool deliberately refuses to work out for you.
The moment a small employer needs one
Most people who make a payslip by hand did not plan to. A shop takes on its second member of staff. A charity starts paying a part-time coordinator. A family employs a carer. Suddenly somebody has to hand over a piece of paper each month that says what was earned, what came off, and what landed in the bank.
The figures themselves usually come from somewhere sensible. An accountant works out the tax. A payroll bureau sends a summary. A spreadsheet holds the salary and the pension percentage. What is missing is the sheet of paper. Copying numbers into a word processor and fighting with a table is where the evening goes.
That is the gap this tool fills. It is a layout engine for one specific document. You supply the figures; it arranges them in the shape a payslip has, totals the columns, writes the net pay out in words and gives you something you can print, save as an image, or export as a spreadsheet row.
What it will not do, and why that matters
It does not calculate income tax. It does not calculate national insurance, provident fund, social security, pension relief or student loan repayments. This is not a missing feature; it is the whole point.
Those amounts depend on the country, the tax year, the person's code or category, their earnings so far, and often on choices they have made about pensions. The rules change every year and sometimes mid-year. A number produced by a web page that knows none of this would still look authoritative sitting in a printed box, and somebody would pay it.
So the tool stays firmly on the presentation side of the line. Work the amounts out with your accountant, your payroll software, or your revenue authority's own calculator. Then come here and make them look like a payslip. The footer of every sheet says so plainly, which protects both you and the person receiving it.
The employer block, typed once
The Employer panel holds the name that prints in large type at the top left, an address block, and an optional logo. Line breaks in the address are kept exactly as you type them, so put the street, the town and the postcode on separate lines.
A logo of about a megabyte or less is plenty. It sits above the employer name, and the page will warn you if the file is large, because the whole draft is kept in the browser and a heavy image makes that draft heavy too. Remove logo undoes it.
These details are shared by everybody on the payroll. Add a second employee and the employer block stays exactly as it was. That is deliberate: nobody wants to retype an address five times on the same afternoon.
Several people on one payroll
The dropdown at the top of the Employee panel lists everyone you have set up. Switching between names swaps the personal details, the earnings lines, the deductions and the year-to-date figures. Whatever you had half-typed is kept, so you can hop between two people while comparing them.
Add someone starts a blank record with a skeleton of pay lines: one earnings row and two deduction rows, ready to be renamed. Copy this one is the more useful button. It clones the current person's whole pay structure, which is what you want when two warehouse staff are on identical terms and only the hours differ.
A copy deliberately drops the employee number, the tax reference and the payslip number. Those identify one individual, and a duplicate of them on a second payslip is the kind of error that takes a week to unpick. The name gets "(copy)" appended so you cannot print it by accident.
Remove deletes a record after asking. The tool refuses to delete the last one, because a payroll with nobody on it has nothing to show.
The period, the pay date and how often they are paid
Pay frequency offers monthly, four-weekly, fortnightly, weekly and quarterly. The choice prints on the sheet, and it also decides how far forward the dates jump when you move to the next period.
Period from and Period to bracket the work being paid for. Set the start and the end follows automatically, one full cycle later minus a day, until you set the end by hand. After that it stays where you put it.
Pay date is the day the money actually arrives, which is usually not the last day of the period. It prints beside the net pay figure, because that is the question the employee is really asking.
The period, like the employer, is shared across everybody. In a real payroll run every person is being paid for the same month, and only the amounts differ. Payslip numbers, on the other hand, belong to the individual.
Earnings lines and the units-times-rate shortcut
Each earnings row has a description, a units box, a rate box, an amount and a year-to-date figure. Basic pay, housing allowance and a fixed travel allowance need only the description and the amount.
Overtime and hourly work are different, and that is what the units and rate boxes are for. Type 6 units at a rate of 18.00 and the amount box fills itself with 108.00 and locks, so what is on the screen cannot drift away from what was agreed. The printed line shows the working underneath: 6 × £18.00. An employee who can see the arithmetic asks fewer questions.
Clear either box and the amount unlocks so you can type it directly. Every figure is handled in whole pence, cents or paise and only converted for display, so a column of odd allowances adds up to the same total a calculator gives.
Deductions, and the percentage box
Deductions are the things the employee genuinely loses from this payslip. Income tax, national insurance, provident fund, pension, a student loan repayment, a season ticket loan, a salary advance being paid back.
Most of these are flat amounts that came from somewhere else, so you type them. Pensions and provident funds are usually a percentage instead, and the percentage box handles that: enter 5 and the tool takes five per cent of total gross earnings and fills the amount, locking the box as it does with overtime. The printed line notes "5% of gross" so the basis is visible.
Note what the percentage is taken from. It is gross earnings on this payslip, the sum of every earnings line. If your scheme calculates on basic pay only, or on qualifying earnings above a threshold, the percentage box will give the wrong figure. Work that one out separately and type the amount.
Employer contributions are not deductions
Employer pension and employer national insurance have their own panel, and they never touch the net pay. This is the single most common mistake in a hand-made payslip, and it is an expensive one.
An employer contribution is money the business pays on top of the salary. It is a cost to the employer, not a loss to the employee. Put it in the deductions column and you have taken money off somebody's pay that they never actually lost, and their net figure will not match what reaches their bank.
They still deserve to be printed. Showing what the job costs the organisation on top of the wage is good practice, and in some countries it is required. The tool gives them a table of their own, clearly separated, with the sheet's footer repeating that they are for information only.
If there are no employer contributions, the panel stays empty and nothing about them prints. A simple payslip stays simple.
Year to date, and the two buttons that maintain it
The right-hand column of each table is the running total for the tax year, and it includes the payslip you are looking at. That is what payroll systems do and what an employee comparing two consecutive slips will expect. If you use a different convention, the numbers on one sheet will contradict the next.
For the first payslip of a new tax year, press First slip of the year. It copies each line's current amount into its year-to-date box, because at that point the two are the same thing.
For every payslip after that, finish the current one and then press Start the next period. It adds this period's figures to the year-to-date column, moves the period dates and the pay date on by one cycle, and increases the trailing digits of the payslip number while keeping the zero padding. If the salary has not changed, next month's payslip is now finished before you have typed anything.
The tool also watches for one particular slip. If the year-to-date gross is smaller than this period's gross, something has gone wrong with the running totals, and the preview panel says so rather than printing a contradiction.
Words, currencies and date formats
Under the net pay figure the same amount is written out in words. A figure that is also spelled out is much harder to alter after printing, and in several countries a salary slip is expected to carry it.
Two styles are available. Million and billion is the international grouping. Lakh and crore is the South Asian one, so a rupee payslip reads "four lakh fifty thousand" rather than "four hundred and fifty thousand". The tool picks a default from the currency and then leaves the choice to you.
The currency list covers more than thirty currencies and controls both the symbol and the digit grouping. Currencies with no small unit, such as the yen and the won, are written without a fractional part in both the figures and the words.
Dates have six formats, from 31 March 2026 through March 31, 2026 to 2026-03-31. This is worth a moment's thought if the payslip crosses a border: 03/04/2026 means two different days depending on who is reading it, while a written month is unambiguous everywhere.
A worked example over two months
A warehouse supervisor is paid monthly. Basic pay is 2,400.00, with a housing allowance of 480.00 and a travel allowance of 120.00. She worked six hours of overtime at 18.00 an hour, so the overtime line gets 6 in units and 18.00 in rate, and the amount fills in as 108.00. Gross earnings come to 3,108.00.
Deductions are income tax of 402.60 and national insurance of 178.32, both supplied by the accountant. Her pension is five per cent, so 5 goes in the percentage box and 155.40 appears. A season ticket loan takes 60.00. Deductions total 796.32 and the net pay is 2,311.68, written out as "Two thousand three hundred and eleven pounds and sixty-eight pence".
Employer contributions go in their own panel: employer pension at three per cent, which fills in as 93.24, and employer national insurance of 281.50. Neither changes the 2,311.68.
This was month three, so the year-to-date column already showed three times each figure. When the payslip has been printed, Start the next period adds this month to those totals, moves the dates to the following month, and turns PS-0003 into PS-0004. Month four needs only the new overtime hours.
Getting the finished sheet out of the page
Print opens your browser's own print box. Everything on screen except the sheet is left out, and the sheet drops back to true A4 size, so what comes out is properly scaled with selectable text. Choosing Save as PDF in that box gives you a PDF without any extra software.
Download PNG writes a picture of the payslip straight to your downloads with no dialogue at all. That is the quickest route on a phone, and the easiest thing to attach to a message.
Save as text gives the same content as plain text for pasting into an email. Download CSV is different: it exports every line as a spreadsheet row, tagged as an earning, a deduction or an employer contribution, with the amount, the year-to-date figure and the currency code, followed by the four totals. That is the file to keep if your bookkeeping lives in a spreadsheet.
Whichever you use, keep the file. The saved copy is your record, and the page cannot produce one for you later.
Mistakes that cause the most trouble
Putting an employer contribution in the deductions panel. It changes the net pay, and the employee will notice when the bank transfer does not match.
Typing a percentage as a decimal. Five per cent is 5, not 0.05. The latter quietly deducts almost nothing and looks perfectly reasonable on the sheet.
Printing a full bank account number. A payslip gets left on desks, photographed and forwarded. The last four digits are enough for somebody to recognise their own account, which is why the field asks for those.
Reusing a payslip number. Two documents with the same reference make any later query impossible to settle. Let Start the next period handle the counting.
Trusting the browser to keep your draft. Clearing browsing data wipes it, and it never appears on another device. The printed file or the PNG is the real record.
Forgetting that deductions exceeding gross gives a negative net pay. The tool flags this loudly rather than hiding it, because it almost always means a figure is in the wrong column.
What a payslip usually has to say
The legal minimum differs from country to country and sometimes by industry, so check what applies where you are. That said, most rules ask for a similar core, and the panels here map onto it.
The employer's name. The employee's name and usually a reference number. The pay period and the date of payment. Gross pay. Every deduction listed separately with what it is for. The net amount. And where pay varies with time worked, the number of hours and the rate, which is what the units and rate boxes give you.
Some places want more: a tax registration number for the employer, the employee's tax code or social security number, a leave balance, or the method of payment. The notes box at the bottom of the form takes free text for anything the layout does not have a field for, and it prints under the totals.
If you are unsure, ask whoever prepares your tax returns. Getting this wrong is usually a small fine and an awkward conversation rather than a disaster, but it is entirely avoidable.
Where all this is kept
Salaries are among the most sensitive figures a small organisation holds. Names, tax references, account digits and what each person is paid all sit in the same document, which is exactly the combination nobody wants travelling across a network.
So none of it does. The whole payslip is drawn by the page itself in your browser. There is no account to create, no server holding a copy, and nobody at this end who could look at your payroll even if asked. You can disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded and the tool carries on working, which is the simplest way to check the claim for yourself.
Your draft, including every employee record, is written into this browser's own storage so you can close the tab and come back next month. That storage belongs to this browser on this computer alone. It does not sync to a phone, and clearing your browsing data removes it.
Treat the page as scrap paper and the file you download as the payslip. Save each one where you keep your records, named with the person and the pay date, and give the employee their copy.