Payroll Management System in PHP and MySQL

• Admin dashboard with HR and payroll metrics
• Manage employees with add, edit, view, and update options
• Manage user accounts, roles, status, and pending signup approvals
• Department management with full CRUD operations
• Designation management with full CRUD operations
• Leave type management
• Leave request approval and rejection system
• Leave balance management per employee
• Attendance management with duplicate entry protection
• Monthly payroll generation for active employees
• Edit payroll records and finalize or unlock payroll
• Search payroll by employee and month
• Payslip finder and printable payslip generation
• Bonus and deduction management
• Loan creation, approval, edit, close, and delete pending loans
• Complaint and support ticket management with admin reply workflow
• Reports and payroll summaries
• Company settings management
• Update admin profile, phone, password, and profile image

• Employee dashboard with personal overview
• Employee profile update
• Upload profile photo
• View personal attendance history
• Apply for leave online
• Edit, cancel, or delete pending leave requests
• View payroll summary
• Download or print payslips
• View loan details and payment information
• Raise complaints or HR support tickets
• Edit or delete open complaints where allowed
• Change password and update security question/answer
• Limited access handling for pending employees
• Blocked user restriction support

• Public landing page with product overview and company information
• Employee self-registration system
• Forgot password with email and security question recovery
• Login with username or email
• Role-based access control for admin and employees
• Secure session management
• CSRF protection for data-changing forms
• Password hashing using PHP password_* API
• PDO prepared statements for database security
• UTF-8 compatible MySQL database structure
• Plain PHP template architecture for easy customization
• Shared CSS design system for consistent UI
• Soft-delete pattern where applicable
• Subdirectory support using BASE_URL
• Upload support for employee and admin profile images

Requirements

• PHP 8 or higher
• MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+
• Apache, Nginx, or PHP built-in server
• PHP extensions: pdo_mysql, json, session

Installation Steps

1. Download or clone the project
   • Place the project folder inside your web server root directory.
2. Create a database

CREATE DATABASE payroll_management CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

3. Import database files
   • Import database/schema.sql
   • Import database/seed.sql
   • If using an older database version, run database/patch_employee_portal.sql
4. Configure database connection
   • Open config/database.php
   • Update:
     • DB_HOST
     • DB_NAME
     • DB_USER
     • DB_PASS
5. Configure base URL if needed
   • Open config/config.php
   • Set BASE_URL if the project is inside a subfolder

define('BASE_URL', '/Payroll%20Management%20System');

6. Run the project
   • Using PHP built-in server:

php -S localhost:8080

• Open in browser:

http://localhost:8080/

7. Set folder permissions
   • Make sure uploads/profiles/ is writable

Default Password

Password: password123

Security Answer for Forgot Password

Security Answer: password123

Demo Accounts

Admin Account

• Username: admin
• Email: [email protected]
• Password: password123

Employee Accounts

• Username: jsmith
• Email: [email protected]
• Password: password123
• Username: jdoe
• Email: [email protected]
• Password: password123
• Username: tnguyen
• Email: [email protected]
• Password: password123
• Status: Pending approval
• Username: demo.blocked
• Email: [email protected]
• Password: password123
• Status: Blocked