Employee Bank Account Self-Service: Stop Managing Payroll Detail Changes by Email

The single most boring HR ticket in any company is “can you update my bank account before the next payroll run?” It’s also one of the highest-risk: get the digits wrong and someone’s salary lands in someone else’s account, with all the downstream chaos that causes.

Leave Balance now lets employees manage their own bank accounts directly. They add, edit, and mark accounts as primary; admins approve and audit. The change flows to payroll automatically.

What “self-service bank accounts” means in practice

Three things that weren’t here before:

• Employees can add multiple bank accounts (e.g., one for salary, one for expense reimbursements).
• They mark one as primary for each purpose (salary, reimbursement, contractor payment).
• Admins see a per-employee log of every change, with the previous and new values.

The accounts are polymorphic, which is engineering-speak for “they attach to multiple owner types.” A bank account can belong to an employee, a contractor, a vendor, or any other future entity, with one primary per owner. Practically, that means as your company adds contractor payments or reimburses non-employees, the same data model handles it.

Why this took longer than it should have

Most leave tools either don’t have bank accounts at all (they hand off to payroll for that) or treat them as a single field on the employee record (no multi-account support, no audit trail).

Single-field is fine until:

• An employee wants their salary in one account and reimbursements in another (common in dual-currency situations like Nepal where USD reimbursements go to a different account than NPR salary)
• A bank account changes mid-year and you need to know which payslip used which account
• A contractor needs to be paid through the same workflow as employees but isn’t an employee
• An auditor wants to see who changed what when

Polymorphic accounts with primary selection and full audit handle all four. It’s not glamorous infrastructure, but it’s the kind of thing that disappears as a problem once it’s done right.

How the workflow works

For employees:

1. Open Profile → Bank Accounts.
2. Add an account: bank name, account number, branch, currency.
3. Mark it primary for salary, reimbursement, or both.
4. Save. The change is timestamped and visible to admins.

For admins:

1. Each change appears in the Audit Log.
2. Critical changes (e.g., new account marked primary for salary) can require admin re-confirmation before the next payroll run picks them up — a setting you control.
3. Bulk export of all employee bank details is available for compliance audits and bank file generation.

For payroll integration:

• Bundled customers (Nepal): the change flows to PayrollApp via webhook. The next payroll run uses the new primary account.
• External payroll customers (UK, AU, NZ, US): the same data is exported in your payroll provider’s format, or pushed via the integration if one is configured.

The security model

Bank account changes are the textbook social-engineering target. We’ve put four guardrails in place:

1. Employees can only edit their own accounts. No “ask HR to update it” flow that requires HR to type bank digits from a chat message.
2. Email/notification on every change. The employee gets an email when a primary-account change is made, regardless of who made it. Anomalies surface fast.
3. Optional admin approval gate for primary-account changes. Off by default for SMB ergonomics; on by default for companies with more than 100 employees or those who toggle it on.
4. Change immediately before payroll run triggers a soft warning. We’ve all seen the scam where someone’s email is compromised, the bank details get changed the day of payroll, and the salary lands somewhere new. The warning catches that pattern.

Where this fits in the larger reshuffle

This feature is part of a broader move at Leave Balance: employee-facing records and workflows are coming home to the leave app, while calculation engines (tax, contributions, statutory deductions) stay in PayrollApp. Bank accounts, expenses, payslip views, salary amendments, and gratuity records have all moved this way over the last quarter.

The pattern is intentional. The data your employees touch belongs in the app they open every day. The math stays in the engine that’s good at math. The webhook between them is event-driven, signed, and retryable.

The bigger point

Bank account changes are the kind of unglamorous workflow that nobody puts on a homepage but everyone runs into in their second month using a tool. Getting it right means not having an HR team type bank digits out of a chat thread, not having a missing audit trail when someone’s salary goes astray, and not having to bolt on a separate “employee self-service portal” product.

If you’re running on email-and-spreadsheet for this today, the migration is roughly an afternoon. The risk of staying on email-and-spreadsheet is roughly one mistyped digit away.