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The payroll dashboard shows a setup checklist the first time you open it. Work through it in order — each step depends on the one before.

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Step 1 — Payroll settings

Open Payroll → Settings.
Working days per month drives every absence deduction. Setting it to 30 rather than 26 changes the daily rate and therefore every deduction. Set it to what your contracts actually say.
The gap between cutoff and payment day is your processing window. Five days is workable; two is uncomfortable, particularly with PAYE due on the 10th.

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Step 2 — Departments

Create your departments — Finance, Operations, Sales, and so on. Every employee is assigned to one. Departments matter for two reasons: department managers only see their own department’s staff, and your payroll cost reports break down by department.

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Step 3 — Job positions

Create the designations you employ: Accountant, Driver, Manager, Technician. Keep them meaningful rather than exhaustive. Positions are used for reporting and for the employee record — a list of forty near-identical titles helps nobody.

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Step 4 — Allowances and deductions

Bumara creates a standard set automatically: Add your own for anything else you pay or deduct — fuel, communications, uniform, a social fund. See Pay elements for how each is configured and taxed.

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Step 5 — Employees

Add your staff. For each you will need: Bumara generates employee numbers automatically. All sensitive fields — NRC, TPIN, bank details — are encrypted. For more than a handful of staff, use the bulk import. See Employees.

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Registering with the regulators

Before you can file returns, you must be registered as an employer.
1

NAPSA

Enter your NAPSA employer number. If you do not have one, raise the employer registration service request. See NAPSA and NHIMA.
2

NHIMA

Enter your NHIMA employer number, or register as an employer.
3

ZRA

Your TPIN is already in your organisation settings. Confirm PAYE is ticked on your ZRA connection. See ZRA overview.
Employing someone creates PAYE, NAPSA and NHIMA obligations from that month, whether or not you have registered. Register before your first pay run, not after.

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Before your first live run

  • Working days matches your contracts
  • Payment day and cutoff day set, with a workable gap between them
  • Overtime multipliers match your policy
  • Maximum deduction percentage set
  • Departments created
  • Positions created
  • Allowances and deductions configured, with the correct tax treatment
  • Every current employee added
  • Every employee has a TPIN, NAPSA number and NHIMA number
  • Bank details verified — check against a statement or a cancelled cheque
  • Salaries correct against contracts
  • Allowances and deductions assigned
  • NAPSA employer number entered
  • NHIMA employer number entered
  • ZRA connected with PAYE ticked
  • Preview a pay run and check every figure
  • Compare against your previous payroll, whatever you used before
  • Generate a payslip and read it as an employee would
  • Only then process

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Your first month

Do not trust the first run blindly. Run it in parallel with however you paid people before, and reconcile the two.
1

Preview the run

Nothing is saved.
2

Compare against your previous method

Employee by employee. Gross, each deduction, net.
3

Investigate every difference

Differences are usually a missing allowance, a wrong salary, or a working-days setting that does not match your contracts. Find the cause rather than adjusting the figure.
4

Correct the setup, not the output

Fix the employee record or the pay element, then preview again. Never patch a number.
5

Process only when they agree

Then keep the comparison as evidence that the transition was clean.
Next: Employees to add your staff, then Pay elements.
Last modified on August 4, 2026