Laravel 12 + Filament: Automating Payroll for 24+ Employees

A practical walkthrough of building an internal payroll system that reduced manual prep by 80%.

Context

During my internship at Valiant Allied Services, Inc., the team managed payroll for 24+ employees across 3 vessel-based branches using spreadsheets. The process was manual, error-prone, and consumed hours each pay period. I was tasked with replacing it with an automated system.

The Problem

▸Manual calculations for 24+ employees took 4+ hours per pay period
▸Philippine statutory deductions (SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, TRAIN) had to be computed by hand
▸No centralized employee records — data lived in disconnected files
▸Generating payslips and reports required copy-pasting between sheets

The Solution

Built a Laravel 12 + Filament admin panel with three core modules:

▸Employee Management — centralized records, branch assignment, role-based access
▸Payroll Engine — configurable rules for basic pay, allowances, overtime, and statutory deductions
▸Reporting — PDF payslip generation, Excel import/export, monthly summaries

Key Technical Decisions

Filament over custom admin — saved weeks of CRUD scaffolding; resources, tables, forms, and actions handled declaratively

Payroll calculation as a service class — PayrollService::compute($employee) keeps logic testable and isolated from HTTP layer

Statutory deductions as config-driven rules — SSS/PhilHealth/Pag-IBIG contribution tables stored in DB, versioned per year; TRAIN tax brackets applied via lookup

80+ PHPUnit tests — feature tests for payroll scenarios (regular, overtime, absent, multiple allowances) + unit tests for deduction math; SQLite in-memory for speed

Docker dev environment — Nginx + PHP-FPM + MySQL matching production; no 'works on my machine' drift

Impact

Metric	Result
Prep Time Reduction	80%
Employees Supported	24+
Branches Covered	3
PHPUnit Tests	80+
Statutory Deductions	SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, TRAIN

Technology Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	Laravel 12 / PHP 8.2
Admin Interface	Filament v5
Database	MySQL 8.0
Frontend	Livewire / Alpine.js / Tailwind CSS
Testing	PHPUnit / SQLite in-memory
Container	Docker / Alpine / Nginx / PHP-FPM
CI	GitHub Actions