jroll

What it does

• The monthly run, start to finish. Employees, earnings, deductions and a payslip for each person, worked out for one period and approved before anything is final.
• Statutory deductions inside the run. PAYE, NSSF, WCF, SDL and HESLB repayments are calculated as part of the payroll, not reconstructed in a spreadsheet afterwards.
• Loans and savings that keep their history. Balances carry from one period to the next and repayments are allocated across multiple loans in order, so a closing balance still reconciles months later.
• Payslips over WhatsApp. Employees request their payslip and apply for leave on WhatsApp — no login, no app to install, on the channel they already use.
• Separation of duties built in. Administrator, HR, preparer and approver are distinct roles, and a run moves through draft and submitted states before anyone can approve it.
• Every run calculated twice. Figures are computed independently on the device and again on the server. If the two ever disagree, the run is flagged rather than quietly approved.

Who it is for

Tanzanian employers running monthly payroll in-house — the size where a spreadsheet has become dangerous but an enterprise system would be absurd. It suits a finance team that already knows its statutory obligations and wants them applied the same way every month.

It is not for you if you pay staff outside Tanzania, or on anything other than a monthly cycle. jroll works in monthly periods and applies Tanzanian rules only.

Handling payroll data

Payroll is the most sensitive data an employer holds, and we would rather you asked hard questions about it than assumed.

• Each organisation is sealed off from every other. Isolation is enforced at the database, not in the interface, so a mistake in the application cannot expose another company's payroll.
• Access follows the role. What a person can see and do is determined by whether they are an administrator, HR, a preparer or an approver.
• It is hosted outside Tanzania. jroll runs on Google's Firebase platform, which means payroll data is stored abroad. We will tell you exactly where and on what terms — it is a question worth putting to any payroll vendor.

Where it has reached

jroll is in pilot. It runs real monthly payrolls for pilot organisations and is not yet sold openly. A mobile app is designed but parked, and we have not begun an independent security assessment of it. We would rather add customers slowly than find a payroll error at scale.