Web-Based Payroll Management System

A proprietary web-based payroll management system built for internal use and deployed to production on the organisation's own Dokploy infrastructure. It exists because payroll processing in the organisation was manual, sensitive, and prone to error, and because the data behind it needs the same validation and audit trail as any other operational system.

Payroll processing was manual and concentrated on a small number of people with deep institutional knowledge of how each case should be handled. That concentration is a risk: it makes the process dependent on individual memory, leaves little audit trail, and makes errors both likely and hard to trace. The organisation needed payroll to run on a system rather than on recall.

What made it hard

• Broke payroll down into distinct stages — data capture, validation, computation, review, and output — so that each stage could be owned and checked independently.
• Identified data validation as the highest-leverage control: most payroll errors originate at capture, not at computation.
• Designed for the sensitivity of the data, keeping processing on infrastructure the organisation controls rather than moving it externally.
• Made review an explicit stage in the system rather than an informal habit, so that the audit trail is a property of the process.

A web application with a MySQL database as the validated system of record, deployed to production on the organisation's own infrastructure. Staff interact with payroll through the browser rather than through spreadsheets passed between people, and every stage of the calculation is captured in the database. Deployment on Dokploy gives the organisation a repeatable, containerised deployment path it can operate without depending on an external platform.

Interface

A web application through which payroll cases are entered, reviewed, and produced.

System of record

MySQL holding validated payroll data, with validation applied before anything is computed.

Process integrity

Capture, validation, computation, and review treated as distinct stages so each can be audited.

Deployment

Containerised deployment on Dokploy, on infrastructure the organisation operates directly.

• Mapped the existing payroll process end to end, identifying where errors entered and which steps depended on individual recall.
• Designed the MySQL schema to capture the inputs behind every figure, so a result can be traced back to the data that produced it.
• Built validation into the capture stage, rejecting incomplete or inconsistent entries before computation.
• Developed the web interface for the administrative users who run the process.
• Deployed the system to production on Dokploy and validated it against the manual process before the manual process was retired.

• Proprietary web-based payroll application running in production.
• MySQL system of record with validation applied at capture.
• Staged process — capture, validation, computation, review — with an audit trail.
• Deployed on the organisation's own infrastructure via Dokploy.
• Sensitive payroll data processed on infrastructure the organisation controls.

• Moved a sensitive, manual, people-dependent process onto a system with an audit trail.
• Established a repeatable containerised deployment path on infrastructure the organisation operates directly.
• Reduced the concentration of payroll knowledge in a single person's memory.

Screenshots for this project have not been published yet.