Where wages go, and what Maliru does with it

Start with what Maliru will not do.

Maliru never moves money, and never sends your people's bank details anywhere. It holds them for exactly one purpose: to build a payment file that you download and upload to your own bank. Every payment is made by somebody at your business, through your bank. Holding bank details does not connect Maliru to that bank.

What is actually stored

The sort code and account number are encrypted, under a key that is not kept in the database. Someone holding a copy of the database holds no bank accounts.

What stays readable is the name on the account, the last four digits of the account number and the last two digits of the sort code — a sort code ending 56 and an account ending 5678, say. That is enough to check a record against a statement, and not enough to pay anyone.

Nobody can read the number back — not an administrator, not Maliru support. It is decrypted in one place only, while a payment file is being written, and every time that happens it is recorded: who did it, which pay run, and how many people. Those records are in the audit trail, under Evidence & audit › Audit trail.

That is why replacing bank details means typing the whole number again. The replace form says so: The number on file cannot be shown.

Where to set them

Open the person under Users, choose Pay, then Show pay. Where they are paid shows what is on file, or No bank details on file.

• Add or Replace opens the form: Name on the account (as the bank holds it — a mismatch is the commonest reason a payment bounces), Sort code (six digits) and Account number (eight digits; a seven-digit number is padded with a leading zero, as banks instruct). Then Save.
• Remove (the ×) asks Remove these bank details? Maliru forgets them, and later payment files leave the person out until new details are given.

A few rules about who and when:

• Adding or replacing needs Manage pay rates, the same permission that opens a rate.
• A person can't enter or change their own bank details in the app yet. Their own record shows what is on file, read-only, and the field app has no bank section. Ask them for their details and enter them yourself.
• Adding or replacing needs the Crew plan. Removing is never blocked, on any plan: holding an account number nobody is allowed to delete would be worse than not holding it.
• The form takes a sort code and an account number, the shape UK banks use. Accounts identified another way — an IBAN, a routing number — can't be stored yet; pay those people from the payment schedule instead.

The payment file

The payment file is for contractors. Your employees are paid by your payroll provider, from the take-home pay it works out, so they are never in it. Bank details are still stored for anybody you record them for.

Open a closed pay run that pays contractors under Pay › Runs, and the More menu offers Payment file for your bank.

It is a CSV with five columns — Payee name, Sort code, Account number, Reference and Amount — one row per contractor, paying what they are due after withholding. The reference is Pay and the last day of the period. It is the common core every UK bank's bulk payment upload is a version of: depending on your bank, upload it directly or paste it into the template your bank provides.

Before you use it:

• It names anybody it could not include. A contractor with no bank details on file is not in the file, and Maliru says who as soon as you download it — for example 3 people have no bank details and are NOT in this file, followed by their names. A payment file missing three of thirty people is an underpayment that looks exactly like a complete file, and nobody counts the rows.
• A payment of zero or less is left out, without being named, because the banks that take these files reject a zero-value row.
• It comes off a closed run only. Until a run is closed the figures can still change, and a payment file that disagrees with the statement is the worst pair of documents to hold.
• It is built when you download it, from the run's frozen figures and whatever bank details are on file at that moment.

Somebody left out has to be paid another way. When the money has gone, record it with Mark as paid on the run — see running pay.

If bank details are not switched on

Bank details need a key that is set up for each Maliru deployment. Where there isn't one, the person's Pay tab says Bank details are not switched on here instead of offering a form, and nothing can be stored.

The payment schedule works either way: it lists the contractors to pay and how much, without account numbers, for keying into your bank by hand.

What this is not

Maliru is not a payment provider and does not want to be. It does not hold your money, it does not start transfers, and adding bank details does not link Maliru to your bank.