Salary advances - Pacten Guides

2026-08-24

An advance is money paid to an employee against pay they have not earned yet, recovered from later payslips. Under People → Advances.

THE LIMITS

Set once, in Settings

So the answer is consistent.

Under People → Settings → Salary advances, a workspace decides the rules before anybody asks: how much can be advanced, whether that is a fixed amount or a percentage of gross, how long somebody must have worked there to be eligible, how long between advances, and how repayment is taken.

Tip

Setting the limits properly is what makes this feature useful. The requester is shown what they can ask for BEFORE they ask, so the conversation is never about whether the number was reasonable — it is a policy the business decided once, applied evenly.

REQUESTING

What an employee does

They can see their own ceiling.

The screen shows what you can request up to, and your own requests with their current state. There is nothing to work out and nobody to ask first.

DECIDING

The approval chain

Same mechanism as everywhere else.

Advances run on the platform’s shared approval chains, configured under People → Settings → Approval chains. Whoever the chain resolves to sees the request under Waiting on your decision, and can approve or decline.

THE STATES

What happens afterwards

The part people forget exists.

Pending — waiting on a decision.
Approved — agreed, but not yet paid out.
Disbursed — the money has actually been given.
Repaying — being recovered from pay. Outstanding shows what is still owed.
Settled — fully repaid, and closed.
Declined or Cancelled — it did not happen, and the record says so.

Watch out

Approved and Disbursed are separate on purpose. Somebody agreeing to an advance is not the same as somebody paying it, and collapsing the two is how an advance gets approved twice or paid without being recorded.

Where it comes off

Assembling a run, and what is deducted automatically.

Running payroll →