Payroll

A Payroll (also called an Organization Unit) is a company within a tenant, with its own regulations, employees and payrun periods.

• Name: functionally important - it's sent with the ELM (Swissdec) transmission and must match the commercial register entry
• In practice: only one Payroll per Tenant is currently supported - see Tenant for details
• Division: a scoping unit 1:1 with a payroll, auto-provisioned on creation of a payroll
• Document language: the language of generated company Outputs, independent of user/employee language - changeable any time

Regulations

Regulations (aka "Payroll Logic") are the rulesets a payroll follows - not just the country-specific one (e.g. Swissdec), but also industry and accounting-related regulations.

• A payroll's regulations are set via PUT /tenants/{orgId}/payrolls/{payrollId}/regulations, where you pick the country regulation, industry regulations (optional, multiple) and the accounting-related regulations.
• Updates: daily, automatically - you don't need to track legal changes yourself
• Content: see Regulations for specific details (cases, wagetypes, etc.)

Accounting Start Date

accountingStartDate is the earliest date the payroll can calculate or post anything - no case change or payrun period can be dated before it. Set it to the first date you want Ason to actually start accounting for this company (e.g. your go-live date with Ason, or the start of the data you're migrating).

• Changing it afterwards: not possible through the standard Settings screen - it's fixed once the payroll exists. The API has a function for rebasing it (the new start date must be after the previous one), but that's ⚠ permanent - it deletes all payrun periods and reopens one with the new date - and only works before the payroll goes live. Treat this as a support-assisted operation, not routine self-service.
• Setting it correctly: always the 1st of a month (e.g. 2026-01-01) - never a mid-month date.
  • Existing company, onboarded mid-year: if payroll data needs to be caught up with retroactive postings - which you always need for a clean year-end - set it to January 1 of the current year, not the onboarding month itself.
  • New company, founded mid-year: if the company is brand new and there's no prior payroll history to catch up on, set it to the month it was founded - its first payrun period.

Go live

• What it is: setting transmissionStartDate on the payroll - the one-time switch after which closing a period also submits to Swissdec.
• How to do it: via Payroll → Settings → "Go live" in the UI, or PUT /tenants/{orgId}/payrolls/{payrollId} with transmissionStartDate set to the period you want transmission to start from, via the API.
• Timing: there's no enforced deadline - it's a manual step you trigger once you're ready for periods to actually be submitted to Swissdec. Periods close normally before that; the Swissdec-specific documents just aren't generated yet. If a company is onboarded with retroactive postings for periods earlier in the current year, Go live is only set once those catch-up payrun periods have been closed.
• Reversibility: ⚠ one-way once transmissionStartDate is set, it can't be reverted through the standard flow.

API Endpoints

Payroll

Regulations

to Feature Map