Multi-country & currency
Operentra is a global product: every workspace runs against the tax, banking and calendar conventions of the country it operates in, in that country's currency. The model is deliberately simple — one workspace, one country, one currency — so that payroll, holidays, documents and formatting are all consistent for everyone in the workspace.
This page explains where those two choices come from, what they control, and why they cannot be changed casually after signup.
Chosen at signup, then locked
When you create a workspace, the signup form asks for your country, your
currency (a 3-letter ISO code such as PKR, AED, GBP), and your time
zone. Those values are stored on the workspace and drive everything below.
Because so much depends on them, country and currency are locked after
signup. The company profile screen (/admin/company/profile) will refuse a
change and show a message like:
Country is set at signup and cannot be changed here — it drives tax,
holidays, banking and formatting. Contact support if it must be corrected.
Currency is set at signup and cannot be changed here — it labels every
payslip and document. Contact support if it must be corrected.
Changing either after data exists would silently corrupt records — for example, switching currency never converts amounts already stored on payslips; it only changes the label. A genuine correction is a platform-operator/support action, not a self-service edit. And it is not a simple field edit either: a support correction runs a dedicated migration that moves the workspace's fiscal years, tax slabs and dependent payroll/leave/tax records onto the new country's calendar (details in the operator docs).
Pick carefully at signup. Everything else — departments, employees, salary structures — can be edited later, but country and currency are foundational.
What your country decides
Your country is resolved to a country pack — a single registry entry that
tells the platform how to localize the workspace. It recognizes your country
whether it was stored as an ISO code (PK), a canonical name (Pakistan), or a
common alias (uae, uk, ksa, usa). From that one lookup, the workspace
gets:
| Area | What the country pack drives |
|---|---|
| Statutory payroll | Which income-tax, provident-fund and gratuity rules apply |
| Pay components | Which statutory components are seeded (e.g. EOBI for Pakistan) |
| Leave entitlements | The statutory leave types, quotas and pay tiers |
| Identity document | Whether staff are asked for a CNIC, an Emirates ID, an NI number… |
| Employee documents | Which document types are required (e.g. residence visa in the UAE) |
| Employment agreement | Which contract template is seeded, and the notice periods and governing law it quotes |
| Public holidays | The country used for automatic holiday sync |
| Bank catalogue | The national list of banks shown when adding accounts |
| Fiscal year | The month your financial year starts |
| Salary slip wording | The amount-in-words currency noun (Rupees / Dirhams / Pounds) and the e-signature statute note on the payslip |
| Formatting | The locale used to format money and dates |
The payslip wording is more than cosmetic: Pakistan slips cite the Electronic Transactions Ordinance 2002 in their e-signature note, UAE slips cite Federal Decree-Law No. 46 of 2021, Australian slips the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth), German and French slips the eIDAS Regulation — and every country whose instrument we have not verified gets a neutral line rather than someone else's statute.
Full statutory packs vs. the generic pack
A full statutory pack carries verified calculation rules for that country. A country without a pack falls back to a generic pack: the workspace still works, but it applies no automatic statutory math — you run configurable/manual payroll until a pack exists for your country.
Countries with a statutory pack today:
| Country | Income tax | Provident fund | Gratuity | Social security |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pakistan | Progressive slabs (FBR) | Employer exempt up to Rs 150,000/yr or 10% of basic | After 5 years, tax-exempt | — |
| United Arab Emirates | None | — | End-of-service gratuity after 1 year | — |
| United Kingdom | Progressive PAYE bands | — | — | National Insurance |
| Saudi Arabia | None | — | Art. 84 award from day one, on the full wage, reduced on resignation | GOSI 9.75% of basic + housing, Saudi nationals only |
| United States (federal only) | Progressive slabs, 2024–2026 seeded | — | — | FICA |
| Canada (federal only) | Progressive slabs, 2024–2026 seeded | — | — | CPP (both ceilings) + EI |
| India (new regime) | Progressive slabs + Section 87A rebate + 4% cess | — | Payment of Gratuity Act (15/26 per year after 5, cap Rs 20,00,000) | EPF 12% of basic to the Rs 15,000/mo ceiling |
| Australia | Progressive resident slabs, FY 2024-25 – 2026-27 seeded | — | — | Medicare levy 2%; superannuation guarantee shown as a 12% employer line |
| Germany | Progressive — brackets are yours to enter (§ 32a is a formula) | — | — | Employee halves of pension, health, care and unemployment insurance (RV/KV/PV/AV) |
| France | Progressive — brackets are yours to enter (per-employee PAS rates) | — | — | Vieillesse, AGIRC-ARRCO and CSG/CRDS employee contributions |
| New Zealand | Progressive PAYE, FY 2025-26 – 2026-27 seeded | — | — | ACC earners' levy (1.75% for 2026/27) to the liable-earnings maximum, year-versioned |
| Singapore | Not withheld by employers — IRAS assesses employees directly | — | — | CPF employee share 20% to the monthly ceiling, Singapore citizens only |
| Philippines | Progressive TRAIN Act rates, calendar years 2024–2026 seeded, on compensation net of the contributions | — | — | SSS 5% to the ₱35,000 MSC, PhilHealth 2.5% to ₱100k/mo, Pag-IBIG ₱200 cap |
Every other recognized country (for example Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa) resolves to the generic pack: no automatic income tax, no statutory PF cap, no automatic gratuity.
Pakistan is the most complete pack — it ships seeded fiscal years, eleven fiscal years of tax slabs (FY 2016-17 through FY 2026-27, tracking each Finance Act), a tax-certificate template, statutory pay components and a full bank catalogue. The United Arab Emirates ships a full bank catalogue and MOHRE-style salary structures alongside its end-of-service gratuity rule; what it does not yet cover is GPSSA pension for UAE/GCC nationals or Wage Protection System (SIF) export. The United Kingdom ships seeded fiscal years (6 April tax years, FY 2024-25 through FY 2026-27) and PAYE bands. The US and Canada ship seeded calendar tax years 2024–2026 with federal bracket tables (US: single filer, standard deduction folded in; Canada: the basic personal amount as a credit, untapered) and ready-made "(Federal Withholding)" structures — but they cover federal tax only: state and provincial income tax is yours to handle, and the seeded structures say so on their face. Saudi Arabia ships the Labour-Law leave set, salary structures with the basic/housing split GOSI is computed on, and end-of-service per Art. 84–85 — note that GOSI is deducted from Saudi nationals only, so payroll refuses to approve while any employee's nationality is unrecorded rather than guess who owes it. India covers the new tax regime only, Section 87A rebate and marginal relief included; old-regime elections and ESI are handled outside the pack. Australia ships July–June fiscal years with resident bracket tables (FY 2024-25 through FY 2026-27, including the legislated 15% first rate from July 2026), the 2% Medicare levy as its own payslip line, an NES leave set, and the 12% superannuation guarantee as an employer contribution that never reduces net pay — the Medicare low-income reduction, HELP repayments and long service leave stay yours. Germany and France automate the employee social contributions (German RV/KV/PV/AV with year-versioned ceilings; French vieillesse, AGIRC-ARRCO and CSG/CRDS against the PASS) and their statutory leave sets, but income-tax withholding is deliberately yours: German wage tax is a formula shaped by tax classes and the French prélèvement à la source uses per-employee rates the tax authority transmits — no honest bracket table exists for either, so payroll approval is blocked until you enter your own approximation or handle tax outside. New Zealand ships April–March tax years with the post-July-2024 PAYE thresholds and the ACC earners' levy as its own line; KiwiSaver is deliberately not seeded (it is opt-out, employee-chosen-rate money) — you add per-employee components for it. Singapore is the special case: the country levies income tax but employers never withhold it — employees are assessed directly by IRAS — so the pack correctly computes no tax line and the Tax screens read as absent (the coverage card says so in as many words, so "not applicable" is never read as "tax-free country"); what it does automate is the CPF employee share for Singapore citizens, with the same recorded-nationality guard as Saudi GOSI. Permanent residents' phased CPF rates need a residency field the system doesn't hold yet, so PR payroll stays yours. The Philippines ships the TRAIN Act withholding table plus all three employee contributions (SSS on the marginal-band approximation of the MSC brackets, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG); the statutory 13th-month pay is paid as a bonus with its ₱90,000 exemption yours to track. As the Tax Code requires, the three employee contributions are taken off gross before the withholding table is applied — the payslip's tax line is computed on taxable compensation, not on gross. One rule holds everywhere: if a fiscal year has no slab data the engine computes zero tax and writes an error to the log — it never silently invents a rate, and payroll approval is blocked until the year has its table.
Your coverage, disclosed in the product
Workspace Settings → Overview carries a Statutory coverage card listing six areas — income tax, employee social security, end of service, statutory leave, the employment contract and public holidays — each marked Automated by us, You configure this, or Not applicable in your country. The statuses are derived from the pack itself, so they change only when the shipped data does, and automated areas cite the statutes they encode so your accountant can verify the claim rather than trust a green tick. "You configure this" is not an error: the feature works, it simply carries no statutory dataset for your country.
No income tax? The tax screens disappear
When your country's pack declares income tax none — the United Arab Emirates,
Saudi Arabia, and every country on the generic pack — the income-tax surfaces
are removed from the product wholesale rather than shown locked: the admin
Tax menu (Tax Slabs, Tax Certificates, Adjustments, certificate Templates),
Tax Reports under Reports, the employee portal's Tax Certificates page,
and the corresponding command-palette (Ctrl-K) search results. A bookmarked URL
shows a calm Not applicable in <your country> panel, and the API answers
404 Not Found on those endpoints.
This is deliberately not the plan-gating experience. A plan lock is a 402 with an upgrade path; here there is nothing to unlock — an annual tax certificate is a receipt for tax withheld at source, and where nothing is withheld every figure on it would be zero.
Two edge rules are worth stating. A workspace whose country is unset is treated as taxable — hiding a withholding receipt from a tenant that owes one is the worse error. And certificates that were already issued keep verifying through their public QR link — a document that was issued does not stop being checkable.
Statutory pay components are country-specific
New workspaces are seeded a standard set of salary components. The universal
ones — Basic Salary (BASIC), Medical Allowance (MED), Conveyance Allowance
(CONV) and Income Tax (TAX) — are created for every country.
Components that only make sense in one country are seeded only for that country. For Pakistan, these are the statutory items:
EOBI_ER/EOBI_EE— EOBI employer and employee sharesPF_ER/PF_EE— Provident Fund employer and employee contributionsGRAT_AC— Gratuity accrualWWF— Workers Welfare Fund
A UAE, UK or US workspace never sees EOBI, because EOBI is a Pakistan-only institution. Each country's own statutory deductions (for example UK National Insurance, US FICA) are contributed by its own pack and appear as their own payslip lines.
For the United Arab Emirates the pack adds the allowance lines a MOHRE
contract is normally split into — Housing Allowance (HOUS), Transport
Allowance (TRANS) and Other Allowance (OTHALW) — plus two ready-made
structures:
- Standard UAE (Basic + Allowances) — Basic at 60% of gross, Housing 25%, Transport 10%, Other 5%. This is the usual private-sector split.
- Standard UAE (Basic Only) — the whole salary as Basic.
The split is not cosmetic: end-of-service gratuity is calculated on the Basic wage only, so a package that is all Basic accrues the largest gratuity liability per year of service. Neither structure carries an Income Tax line, because the UAE has no personal income tax.
Saudi Arabia gets the same allowance lines (HOUS, TRANS, OTHALW)
plus a GOSI deduction line and two structures — Standard Saudi (Basic +
Allowances) (60/25/10/5) and Standard Saudi (Basic Only). The split is
load-bearing in the Kingdom too, but for the opposite reason to the UAE:
GOSI's contributory wage is basic + housing, while the end-of-service
award is on the full wage — so the split governs the monthly deduction,
not the end-of-service liability. The United States gets a FICA line and
Standard US (Federal Withholding); Canada gets CPP and EI lines
and Standard Canada (Federal Withholding). India gets HRA and
OTHALW allowances, an EPF line and Standard India (New Regime) (Basic
50% / HRA 30% / Other 20%) — under the new regime HRA carries no tax
exemption; the split exists because EPF and gratuity are computed on basic.
Workspaces on the Pakistan pack are seeded exactly one ready-made structure: Standard Pakistan IT — Basic at 100% of gross plus slab-based income tax. The statutory components (EOBI, PF, gratuity accrual, WWF) are all provisioned, and a workspace that wants PF or gratuity builds its own structure from them. (Two extra structures that used to ship encoded one company's own policy and were removed.)
Leave entitlements follow your country
New workspaces are seeded the statutory leave types for their own country, and the default Office Staff leave group is built from that same set.
- Pakistan — annual (14), casual, sick, maternity (84), paternity, Hajj/Umrah, marriage, bereavement and unpaid leave, per the Punjab Ordinances, plus two extra groups for live-in staffing patterns — Reduced Quota (a smaller annual entitlement whose rest days come from the shift pattern) and Cyclic Rest (continuous-duty staff who accrue rest days per days worked).
- United Arab Emirates — Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021: annual leave of 30 calendar days after six months, sick leave of 90 days across three pay tiers, maternity leave of 60 days across two tiers, five days' parental leave for either parent, bereavement, study leave and national-service leave.
- Saudi Arabia — the Labour Law set: annual leave of 21 days (the Art. 109 floor — raise long-service staff to 30 yourself), sick leave of 120 days across three pay tiers (30 full / 60 at three-quarters pay / 30 unpaid), maternity of 10 weeks, and the per-event entitlements — paternity, marriage, bereavement, Iddah, Hajj and examination leave — granted on demand rather than as annual balances.
- Anywhere else — a neutral starter set (annual, sick, maternity, parental, bereavement, unpaid) with sensible quotas you are expected to adjust to your own law. It claims no statute.
Half-pay leave is approximated. A leave type is either fully paid or fully unpaid — there is no percentage-of-pay setting. Where the UAE grants half pay, the tier is a separate, fully-paid leave type named "(Half Pay)", and HR posts the 50% reduction as a payroll adjustment. Erring towards paying in full is deliberate: underpaying statutory leave is the worse mistake.
The employee identity number follows your country
The identity field on the employee record is labelled for your country: a CNIC in Pakistan, an Emirates ID in the UAE, a National Insurance number in the UK, and so on — with the matching example and digit-count validation. Pakistan's NTN (an FBR tax number) is only shown to Pakistani workspaces. The phone-number field's default dial code follows the workspace's country too — a UAE workspace defaults to +971, not +92 — and the nationality field is always collected rather than inferred from the company country.
Required employee documents follow too. A UAE workspace is asked for an Emirates ID, a Residence Visa and a Labour Card (MOHRE) — all three carrying expiry dates the employer must track — and is never asked for a Pakistani domicile certificate.
The employment agreement follows your country
Every workspace is seeded a Standard Employment Agreement contract template. Which one you get depends on your country, and the notice periods, restraint limits and governing-law clause inside it are filled in from your country's statute rather than hardcoded.
- Pakistan — the full agreement drafted against the Contract Act 1872, the Punjab Ordinances, ITO 2001 and PECA 2016, with judicial stamp-paper and witness variants.
- United Arab Emirates — an agreement drafted against Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 and Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022. It is written as a supplement to the MOHRE standard contract, not a replacement: it states on its face that the registered MOHRE contract and the Law prevail over anything in it, and that any term purporting to waive a statutory right is void. It covers fixed-term employment (Art. 8), the asymmetric probation notice of Art. 9, the 30–90 day notice band (Art. 43), WPS payment, overtime at basic +25% / +50% (Art. 19), end-of-service gratuity on basic wage (Art. 51), the Art. 44/45/47 termination grounds, 14-day final settlement (Art. 53), the two-year non-compete cap (Art. 10), and the employer's obligations on recruitment costs, health insurance, repatriation and passport retention.
- Saudi Arabia — the standard agreement rendered with the Kingdom's own statute: notice and probation per the Labour Law (Royal Decree M/51), the Art. 83 two-year restraint cap, the Electronic Transactions Law e-signature citation, and GOSI named as a contribution for Saudi nationals.
- Anywhere else — a country-neutral agreement. Every statutory citation in the template is filled from your country's data where we model it and omitted where we do not: a German workspace's contract says "subject to applicable tax deductions under the laws of Germany" rather than citing another country's ordinance — or inventing a plausible-looking German one. The leave-year window, identity-document label and currency all follow your workspace. Review it with counsel before issuing contracts.
Seeded agreements are starting points, not legal advice. Have local counsel review the template before issuing contracts. In the UAE the Arabic text filed with MOHRE prevails over the English version in any dispute.
Pay-grade bands follow your currency
Every workspace is seeded the same pay-grade structure — grades PG-1
through PG-7, with the standard job titles mapped to each grade. What differs
by workspace is the salary band on each grade, because a fixed rupee range
would be nonsense for a dirham or pound workspace.
- Bands are seeded from a preset that matches your currency. Presets exist for
PKR,AED,SAR,INR,USDandGBP. - If your currency has no preset, the grades are still created but with blank (0 / 0) bands for you to fill in — never another currency's numbers.
- The lowest grade,
PG-1, starts at 1 in every currency, so the smallest payable salary maps to a grade and casual/part-time pay never falls below the scale.
Pay-grade ranges are guideline benchmarks for HR. An employee's actual pay is set on their contract and can differ from the grade range.
Public holidays
Holidays are managed per workspace under the admin holiday screens, and can be populated automatically for your country. When you sync, the platform resolves your workspace's country to its holiday calendar — a UAE workspace gets UAE holidays, a Pakistan workspace gets Pakistan holidays — and proposes them as suggestions you accept or dismiss.
- Automatic sync uses the platform's Calendarific integration (an operator-level API key).
- If your country resolves to the generic pack (no known code), automatic sync is not offered and you add holidays manually:
Automatic holiday sync isn't available for <your country> yet.
Add your public holidays manually below.
Accepted suggestions become real holidays that payroll and leave then treat as non-working days.
Bank catalogue
When adding employee or company bank accounts, the workspace shows the national bank catalogue for its country plus any banks the workspace has added itself.
- The shared national catalogue is read-only to workspaces; you cannot edit or delete those entries, but you can add your own.
- Complete national catalogues ship for Pakistan (including 1Link/IBFT codes) and the United Arab Emirates — every CBUAE-registered bank plus the major exchange houses, each carrying its SWIFT/BIC, its 3-digit IBAN bank code and its 9-digit UAE routing code. Starter lists of major banks ship for the United Kingdom, United States and Canada.
- A country without a seeded catalogue simply starts empty — you add the banks you use.
Fiscal year
Your country sets the month your financial year starts. Most countries default to a January (calendar-year) start; the built-in exceptions include:
| Fiscal year starts | Countries |
|---|---|
| July | Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Australia |
| April | India, Japan, United Kingdom, New Zealand |
| March | South Africa |
| January (default) | Everywhere else |
Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and India also ship
ready-made fiscal-year records (Pakistan: 1 July – 30 June; UK: 6 April –
5 April; US and Canada: calendar years 2024–2026; India: 1 April – 31 March). Other countries get
the correct fiscal-year window at runtime from the start-month above, and you
can still manage fiscal-year records yourself under the company settings —
though manual management is now for history and corrections, not for opening
each new year. The start month can be overridden per workspace via the
tax.fiscal_year_start_month company setting.
Fiscal years roll over automatically. A daily platform job (with a catch-up at platform start) opens the next fiscal year on the day after your current one ends and marks it current, so leave carry-forward and new-year quotas run the same night and payroll, leave and tax certificates never attach to an expired year.
The next window is derived from your workspace's own previous year — start = the day after the previous end, end = one year minus a day later — never from a country default, so the UK's 6 April – 5 April and any custom window an admin configured survive the roll; the country start-month only bootstraps a workspace that has no fiscal years at all. The job adopts an existing overlapping record instead of duplicating it, and it refuses to guess: if your configured years have a gap around today, or the newest year is more than 15 years stale, it stops and asks you to resolve it on the Fiscal Years page (Company Setup → Fiscal Years).
Formatting locale
Each pack also carries a locale (for example en-PK, en-AE, en-GB,
en-US) used to format money and dates consistently for the workspace.
Workspaces created before their pack existed
Tenant provisioning only fills gaps, so a workspace onboarded before its country pack shipped is brought up to the pack automatically at deploy time by an additive-only backfill — it adds missing leave types, documents and components, raises statutory leave quotas that sit below the legal minimum (never lowers anything), and swaps the seeded agreement while preserving anything already signed.
In short
Your country and currency are chosen once, at signup, and then treated as fixed. Together they select your statutory payroll rules, the pay components and holidays you see, your bank catalogue, your fiscal year, your pay-grade bands and your number/date formatting — so the rest of the workspace behaves correctly for where you operate without any further configuration.
Language is a separate axis from country: a UAE workspace can run in English or Arabic (or a mix — UI per person, emails per recipient, documents per workspace). See Languages & localization.