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A pay element is the building block of every payslip line in Flow Payroll. Whenever an employee is paid or deducted anything — basic pay, overtime, a bonus, a season-ticket loan repayment — the line references a pay element, and the pay element decides how that money is treated: whether it’s taxed, whether it attracts National Insurance, whether it counts towards pension contributions, holiday accrual, or National Minimum Wage checks, and whether a court order can attach to it. That’s the point of defining them once: you set the treatment on the element, and every line that uses it — typed into a pay run, imported from CSV, or created by a recurring payment — calculates correctly without anyone re-deciding the rules each time.

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What a pay element defines

Every element has a code (a short unique identifier like OVERTIME — this is what CSV imports and the API reference it by) and a description (what employees see on their payslips). The rest falls into three groups:

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Treatment

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Defaults

Optional values that pre-fill a line when someone picks the element in a pay run: Default Unit (Hour, Day, Week, Month, Year, Fixed, Informational, or Percentage), Default Pay Rate, Default Unit Value, and Default Charge Rate (used when on-charging clients).

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Court order eligibility

Seven flags control whether deductions for each court order type can attach to earnings from this element: CMS DEO (Child Maintenance Service), DEA (Direct Earnings Attachment), AEO Priority and AEO Non-Priority (Attachment of Earnings), CTAEO (Council Tax), EA (Earnings Attachment), and MCAEO (Maintenance Calculation). All default to eligible. See court orders for how attachable earnings are calculated.

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Managing pay elements

Go to Settings → Pay elements.
Pay elements tab in Workspace settingsPay elements tab in Workspace settings

Pay elements in Workspace settings

The page has two sections:
  • System Pay Elements — pre-configured elements that ship with Flow Payroll and cannot be modified. These cover the standard cases, so most organisations only add elements on top.
  • Custom Pay Elements — your organisation’s own elements. Click Add Element to create one, or the pencil and bin icons to edit or delete. Export CSV downloads your custom elements — useful as a backup, or for importing into another organisation.

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Importing pay elements from CSV

If your pay elements already exist in another system — or in another Flow organisation, via Export CSV — import them in bulk with Import from CSV. The importer runs on Flow Payroll’s shared import wizard: upload a CSV or Excel file, map the columns once, and save the mapping for next time. See importing data from CSV for how the wizard works.

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Mandatory columns

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Optional columns

Yes/No columns accept Yes/No, True/False, or 1/0. Template (pay_element_import_template.csv — identical to the wizard’s Download template):
Download pay_element_import_template.csv

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Where pay elements show up

Running a pay run

Every payment or deduction line — added by hand or imported from CSV — references a pay element by its code.

Payroll Journals

Journal templates map each pay element to a nominal code in your chart of accounts.

Holiday & leave

Percentage-of-time accrual counts hours from elements with holiday accrual switched on.

Invoices & billing

Billing maps pay elements to account codes when payroll syncs to invoices.