A man's salary is held while an inquiry runs

"There is an inquiry against Tariq. Hold his salary until it is finished, then release it in one go."

What is really being asked

Two things: stop the money, and keep track of what is owed so it can be paid later. This page is the most important one in this section, because the screen that looks as though it does this does not.

Request for Salary Hold records the decision and routes it for approval. The payroll run does not read it. There is no setting that makes it read it. So:

• An approved salary hold does not withhold anything. Tariq is paid in full.
• There is no accumulated held amount anywhere.
• There is no release action, because nothing was ever held back.

Say this to the client on the first day. A client who believes the hold works, and finds out three months later that a suspended man has been paid throughout, will not forgive the surprise.

What the screen is for

It is still worth using, for exactly what it is: a dated, approved record of a decision, with a reason. Request No, Request Date, Employee, Date From, Reason and Reason Details. There is no To date, no amount and no release field, which is itself the clue that the money side is not handled here.

It validates nothing, so it saves whatever you type. Read it back.

What you need in place first

• Request for Salary Hold - for the record and the approval trail.
• Wage Type - a deduction wage type, direction C Credit, for the method below. Call it HOLD-SAL, "Salary held pending inquiry".
• Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction - for both the holding and the release.
• A decision from the client on which method below he wants, because the two leave very different trails.

Do this

1. Raise the record. Open Request for Salary Hold. Employee Tariq, Date From the date the inquiry started, Reason and Reason Details naming the inquiry. Get it approved. This is the governance step and it has value, as long as nobody thinks it is the money step.

2. Then hold the money, by deduction. This is the method to recommend. Open Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction for the period, with Payroll Period From and Payroll Period To both set to that one period. Add a line for Tariq, wage type HOLD-SAL, with the amount being his net pay for the month.

3. Run Payroll unposted and check his net comes to zero, or to whatever the client has decided he keeps. Then post as normal.

4. Repeat for each period the inquiry runs. A new one-period document each month. There is no standing instruction for this, and that is deliberate on your part: a monthly decision is a monthly reminder that a man is not being paid.

5. Keep the running total yourself. Nothing accumulates it. A line in the client's own file, or the sum of the HOLD-SAL lines on the payroll reports, is the only record of what is owed. Agree at the start who keeps it.

6. Release it. When the inquiry clears, create one more Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction for one period, with an earning wage type and the full accumulated amount. If the inquiry goes against him and the money is forfeited, release nothing and record the decision.

Where two clients differ

	Hold by deduction	Leave him out of the run
What you do	A deduction line each period	Exclude him from the payroll run
Payslip	Produced, showing the deduction	None produced
Is the amount recorded anywhere	Yes, as deduction lines you can total	No, nothing exists
Is the tax right	The gross and the tax are computed as normal	No tax record for the period at all
Release	One earning line for the total	A separate payment, worked out by hand
Recommended	Yes	Only if the client insists

Push the client towards the first column. The deduction method keeps the man's gross, his tax and his contribution history intact, which matters when the inquiry ends and somebody has to reconstruct what he was owed. Leaving a man out of a run leaves a hole in a year of records to pay for one month of convenience.

What cannot be done, plainly

Put these in the implementation document.

• The salary hold request does not stop a payment. Nothing reads it except a dashboard tile that counts it.
• There is no held balance, no statement and no release button.
• There is a Salary Block flag on the recurring salary record. Payroll does not read that either. Do not use it expecting an effect.
• Nothing links the release back to the hold. The connection exists only in the reason text you typed and in the client's own file.

How you prove it worked

1. Run Payroll unposted. Tariq's net must be what the client decided, usually zero. His gross must be unchanged, which is how you know you held the pay rather than deleted the salary.
2. Confirm his tax line is still computed. A zero net with a zero tax means the salary was removed, not held.
3. Check nobody else's net moved.
4. Add up the HOLD-SAL lines across every period of the inquiry and compare against the figure in the client's own file. Those two numbers are the whole audit of this exercise, so check them every month, not at the end.
5. After release, confirm the earning line equals that total to the rupee.

What will go wrong

• The hold request is raised, approved, and nothing else is done. Tariq is paid in full all the way through the inquiry. This is the default outcome and it is why this page exists.
• The man is removed from the recurring salary record to stop the pay. That destroys his salary history and his first payslip after release will be wrong.
• The amount held is the gross, not the net, so his net goes negative and the figure that has to be released is wrong. Hold the net.
• The accumulated total is kept by nobody. Six months later three people have three different figures and the man is in the room.
• The deduction document is given an open window, so it keeps deducting after the inquiry ends. One period per document, every time. See a bonus is paid once, in one month only.