Pay transparency

What Pay Transparency is and what it does for a company

Pay Transparency evaluates job positions against objective criteria, groups them into categories of comparable work value, and checks whether pay between women and men within each category differs by more than the configured threshold allows. On top of that, the module adds an internal pay-system document, employee requests for information about their own pay, and an audit trail of who justified each gap and why.

The module is built on Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency and on the national legislation transposing it. It lets a company put together its job catalogue and pay ranges well ahead of time, instead of assembling them under pressure right before the first deadline.

Seven tabs on a single screen cover the whole cycle: Compliance overview shows what's done and which deadlines the company faces, Job catalogue scores positions and groups them into categories, Pay system sets the pay ranges and issues the internal document, Reporting periods pull together data for a specific year, Pay gap report works out where a gap sits above the threshold, Correction offers a financial fix or room for a justification, and Information requests handle a specific employee's question about their own pay. HR staff and payroll accountants find company-wide tools here; a rank-and-file employee finds just one button to ask about their own pay.

How Pay Transparency works in eIntranet, step by step

Work in the module starts with the catalogue, not a list of employees. First come the job categories with a point range from zero to one hundred and the evaluation criteria; only then do individual positions get scored – for each criterion you pick a scale level or the Not evaluated option, or you assign the category manually with your own justification. Saving automatically recalculates the points and, without any manual step, the matching category too; the same recalculation runs again whenever a criterion's weight or a category boundary changes later.

On the Pay system tab, each category gets an hourly or monthly pay range – saving rejects an empty form with a message that at least one of the two is required. Alongside the ranges, you manage pay components (base pay, personal bonus, allowances, a meal contribution and more), and at the end you print the internal document with a four-point checklist – without all the steps done (categories, ranges, components, effective date), printing warns that the document is still missing something.

Only then comes the turn of Reporting periods: you set up a date range (pre-filled to the whole previous year), which gets filled either by the Build data button straight from the payroll and attendance records, or by importing a spreadsheet for companies that run payroll elsewhere. Closing a period freezes it, and the report built from it stays reproducible years later. On the Pay gap report tab, one click on Recalculate works out the indicators and lets you download them as a PDF or an XLSX; for a category above the threshold, the module immediately offers either the Correction simulator or room for a written Justification. Alongside all that, an employee's request for pay information can arrive at any time – it runs outside the reporting-period cycle, and the company answers it on its own deadline.

Everything the module does

Seven main parts of the module cover job evaluation, pay rules, data, gap calculation, correction and communication with employees:

The module also keeps an eye on a few things that would otherwise rest on an HR person's memory: it automatically hides a small category from the outputs, works out a quartile only once the full data set is in, and watches an approaching deadline by e-mail – more detail follows in the section on where the data comes from and in the rollout steps.

How to choose a pay-transparency module: what to ask before you buy

Before a company decides to handle pay equality with a spreadsheet or with a ready-made module, it's worth asking a few concrete questions – the answers for eIntranet are documented in the help, not just promised at a sales meeting.

Does it work with hourly pay, not just monthly salary? Without that, a part-time contract manufactures a gap that doesn't really exist – so the module compares the hourly rate, and for the calculation it takes either the pay actually paid out during the period, or the agreed rate on the reference date, depending on a setting.

Does it protect small teams, or does it give away a specific salary? A category below the configured headcount (five by default) or below the configured headcount of one gender (three by default) is hidden from both the chart and the tables; if only one category ends up suppressed at a level, the next-smallest one is automatically suppressed too, so it can't be worked out by subtracting from the total.

Can it take pay data from elsewhere? Companies that don't run payroll in eIntranet upload a spreadsheet based on a downloaded template; importing the same employee again overwrites the row instead of duplicating it.

Does it work out how much a correction will cost before the company commits to it? The correction simulator puts together a scenario broken down by employee, with the increase shown both monthly and annually, before anything gets accepted.

Does it watch deadlines on its own, or do you have to track them in a calendar by hand? Every night, the module checks the reply to the employee and the correction of the gap, and sends an e-mail reminder according to a configured cascade of days, as long as that cascade field isn't empty.

Who's allowed to change the parameters that affect the report's result? The gap threshold, the small-category protection limits, the calculation method and the deadlines can only be changed by the module's administrator – not by everyone who's allowed to evaluate positions.

Pay Transparency for small companies and for large employers

A company with a single workshop and ten people faces a different problem than a manufacturing plant with dozens of positions and a trade union – the module adapts to both, but not in the same way.

A small company usually has just a handful of job categories, and quite a few of them have three or four people – that's exactly where small-category protection matters, because the average of three people effectively gives away a specific colleague's salary. A small company also has to be able to answer an individual employee's request for pay information – that's an entitlement that doesn't depend on the company's size, or on whether the company otherwise uses the module actively.

At larger employers, both the number of job categories and the people in them grow, and with that grows the weight of the Pay gap report, whose tables and chart only start to make sense with dozens of employees split across several categories. The need for a Joint assessment with employee representatives grows too, because at a larger company it's more likely that some job category's gap won't line up with an accepted justification in time.

eIntranet's pricing, meanwhile, doesn't care whether a company is only trying the module out or has it running at full scale – it's tiered by the company's total user count, from one up to a hundred and one and beyond, the same as for every other module. So a small company and a large one pay for the same thing: people's access to eIntranet, not the size of the job catalogue.

Where the module gets its pay data from, and where it goes

A reporting period can be filled in two ways, depending on where the company runs payroll. The Build data button works out a row for every employee straight from the payroll and attendance records kept in eIntranet – base pay, bonuses, overtime, a meal contribution and benefits such as a company car or a work-from-home allowance, if counting them in is switched on. Companies that process payroll elsewhere (typically in systems such as Vema, KS mzdy, Helios or Pohoda) use Import from spreadsheet instead: they download a sample file, fill it in within their own payroll system and upload it back – the file may have no more than 500 rows, and matching runs by the employee's e-mail address or personnel number, so uploading the same person again just overwrites the row.

You don't need any hardware. Unlike attendance tracking or a vehicle fleet, the module doesn't work with any physical unit or reader – all the data comes either from another record in eIntranet, or from an uploaded file.

On the output side stand four documents: the internal pay-system document as a PDF, the pay gap report as both a PDF and an XLSX, and the reply to an employee's information request as a downloadable PDF once the request has been answered. The data also travels further inside eIntranet – once a job category has a valid pay range, a new job advertisement form in the Job vacancies module fills in the Pay from/to field on its own after you pick the category, and an HR person only adjusts it by hand from there if needed.

How much Pay Transparency costs

Pay Transparency is included in every eIntranet plan – the module adds nothing to what a company pays for people's access to the system as a whole.

The unit you pay for here, though, isn't what an HR person used to paying per "payroll seat" might expect: every employee has the right to ask about their own pay, even one who otherwise has no access to the module at all, so the price is set by the company's total eIntranet user count, not just by the narrow circle of payroll staff who see the summary data. A company with 45 eIntranet users falls into the band starting at 21 users: 45 × €2.1 (the normal plan) works out to €94.5 a month for the whole system, not just for this module.

Setting up custom evaluation criteria, their weights or the scale is something an HR person can handle without outside help, right in the Job catalogue; for the statutory criteria, only the underlying aspect stays fixed. If a company still wants help adjusting formulas or connecting to a payroll system outside eIntranet, consultation and custom programming are billed by the hour, at the rates on the current price list at /en/pricelist.

Pay Transparency for free: what you can do without paying, and where the line is

A company with two or three positions on paper can work out a pay gap in an ordinary spreadsheet – adding up the hourly pay of women and men in a category and comparing the averages is something anyone can do without any tool at all.

The line appears the moment there are more categories, and some of them have only a few people. A spreadsheet can't tell on its own that a three-person category would give away a specific colleague's salary, and without intervention it shows it exactly the same as a ten-person one. Nor does it keep an audit trail of who justified a gap, when and on what grounds, once an employee representative or the person concerned asks about it later. And it won't watch the two-month deadline for answering everyone who requests information – an HR person has to track that alone, probably in a calendar alongside dozens of other dates.

You don't have to try it blind – a free 14-day trial is enough to set up a job catalogue and evaluate the first position, before the company decides whether a spreadsheet is still enough, or it's time for the module.

How to roll out Pay Transparency

The module is part of the plan, so there's nothing separate to switch on – the first step is to set who gets in and with what permission. On the Access rights tab in the module's settings, every job position and every individual user gets assigned one of six levels; the Select all button for each column checks a level for everyone at once, which is handy especially for the lowest level, which every single employee should have because of their right to request information about their own pay.

On the General settings tab, the module's administrator fine-tunes the gap threshold, the small-category protection limits, the deadline for replying to an employee, the deadline for correction, and the cascade of days for e-mail reminders – the defaults (five people in a category, three of one gender, sixty days to reply, six months to correct) can be changed at any time, but they affect the report's result, which is why only the administrator has access to them.

The evaluation itself then goes fast: the first visit to the Job catalogue automatically creates the nine statutory work-value criteria and the two criteria for a later justification in an otherwise empty catalogue; the first visit to the Pay system similarly creates eight default pay components linked to the payroll data. All that's left is to add the job categories, evaluate the positions, set the pay ranges, issue the internal document and open the first reporting period – and the module is in live use.