Payroll and accounts together in Tanzania: Powerpay with TallyPrime

TallyPrime has a payroll module: employee records, pay heads for earnings and deductions, attendance, payroll vouchers and payslips. Its statutory side, though, is built around Indian rules. Tally’s payroll help lists PF, ESI, NPS, Professional Tax and Indian income tax, none of which apply to a Tanzanian employer.

TallyPrime doesn’t calculate Tanzanian PAYE, NSSF, SDL or WCF. For a Tanzanian business, the practical setup is to run payroll in software built for Tanzania and bring the results into TallyPrime, where the rest of your books already are.

Payroll rules and returns are specific to each country, so payroll software made for Tanzania keeps that work in one place and leaves TallyPrime to do what it does well: your accounts, stock, banking and reports.

Powerpay is payroll software built by Powercomputers, the company behind PowerTally. Its site describes a payroll run that calculates gross pay, deductions and net pay for the whole team in one action, handling PAYE, NSSF, SDL, WCF, NHIF and HESLB deductions.

For the returns, Powerpay exports the monthly PAYE and SDL return in the format TRA’s IDRAS system accepts, the HESLB deduction schedule and NSSF contribution reports. It produces payslips and e-slips, bulk salary files for banks including CRDB, NMB, NBC, Stanbic, Standard Chartered, Absa, Exim, DTB and Equity, and reports such as cost to company and a month-on-month comparison.

Around the payroll it covers attendance from ZKTeco biometric devices, shifts, leave, and loans and advances, with roles for Admin, HR, Finance and Manager and an audit log of payroll actions.

Powerpay’s integrations page lists TallyPrime, with “automatic export of salary data to Tally Prime for accounting and reconciliation.” Payroll is calculated once, in Powerpay, and the salary figures go to TallyPrime instead of being keyed in again from a printed summary.

Powerpay’s site doesn’t describe the layout of that export, so ask in your demo to see how salaries, deductions and employer contributions arrive in TallyPrime and which ledgers they use. Agree it with your accountant before the first payroll month goes across.

Attendance comes in from the biometric devices, leave and loans are already recorded, and payroll runs in Powerpay. HR checks the run, payslips go out, the bank file goes to the bank and the PAYE and SDL return file is ready to upload to IDRAS.

The salary data then goes across to TallyPrime, where the accounts team checks it against the payroll summary, matches the salary payments on the bank statement, and reports payroll cost alongside everything else in the month’s accounts.

Payroll is one of the biggest regular costs for most employers. When the figures in your accounts come from the same run that produced the payslips and the TRA return, the expense in your profit and loss, what you owe and what left the bank tell the same story.

It also keeps the work where it belongs. HR or payroll staff run Powerpay with access limited by role, while the finance team works in TallyPrime, alongside bank reconciliation and the rest of the reports.

Powercomputers builds Powerpay and has been a Tally partner in Tanzania since 2004, so payroll and accounts come from the same company. The PowerTally team installs and configures TallyPrime, trains your team in-house, on-site or remotely, and gives day-to-day support with technical issues and accounting errors across all of its products.

If you already use TallyPrime and run payroll in a spreadsheet, bring a recent payroll summary to the demo so the conversation starts from your own figures. Book a free TallyPrime demo with us, and see Powerpay itself at tanzaniapayroll.co.tz.