Maltese services-business owner on her premises, payroll chosen and handled, back to the work

How to choose payroll software for a Maltese business

Most payroll software is sold on the length of its feature list. For a Maltese business, the feature list is not where the risk sits. A tool can have every reporting dashboard and self-service widget on the market and still get a Maltese pay run wrong. The things that matter here are local, specific, and easy to check before you buy.

This is what to look for, and what to ignore, when the software has to run payroll under Maltese rules.

Start with the rules it has to get right

Payroll software earns its place by handling the Maltese essentials without you checking its working every month. Before any feature demo, confirm the tool does these correctly:

  • Income tax under FSS. It must apply the right tax status — single, married, or parent — and the current year’s bands, and deduct tax at source each pay run. Ask which year’s bands it ships with, and how they update when new ones are published.
  • Social security, both sides. It should calculate the employee’s contribution and the employer’s matching share, and show the employer cost clearly. That cost never appears on the payslip, and it is the part most often under-budgeted.
  • Statutory bonuses and the cost-of-living adjustment. These are paid across the year and folded into pay. A tool built for another country will not know they exist.

If a vendor cannot show you these working on a real Maltese example, the rest of the demo does not matter.

The filing is half the job

Deducting correctly is only useful if the returns follow. Maltese payroll means the monthly FS5 to the Commissioner for Revenue. It also means the annual FS3 for each employee and the FS7 reconciliation. Ask how the software produces them, and whether it can submit them or only prepare them. A tool that computes pay perfectly but leaves you to assemble the FS5 by hand has solved the easy half, and left you the deadline-driven one.

Local support beats a bigger feature set

Payroll questions are urgent and specific. A new hire’s tax status. A mid-month leaver’s final pay. A query on an FS3 line. When one lands, you need an answer from someone who knows Maltese payroll — not a ticket queue in another timezone working from generic documentation. A smaller tool with local expertise often beats a larger one here, because the larger one treats Malta as a rounding error. Ask where support sits, and whether the people answering understand FSS.

Where integration genuinely helps

Payroll does not start at payroll. It starts with hours worked and leave taken. If attendance and leave live in separate systems, someone re-keys them into payroll each month. Every re-keying is a chance to introduce an error. Software where attendance and leave feed the pay run directly removes that step. This is a real benefit, not a feature-list entry — but only if the pieces are genuinely connected. Ask to see the hours flow from clock to payslip, not just sit in adjacent modules.

Data, security, and who can see payroll

Payroll is among the most sensitive data a business holds. Two questions are worth asking plainly: where is the data hosted, and who inside your business can see it. Hosting inside the EU and a recognised security standard such as ISO 27001 are reasonable baselines, not premium extras. On access, the software should let you decide precisely who sees pay figures. “The HR system” and “the payroll figures” are not the same permission. Treating them as one is how salaries end up visible to the wrong people.

What to ignore

Two things distract more than they help. The first is a raw feature count. A longer list is not a better fit, and features you will never use are not value. The second is any comparison built around a generic international tool’s marketing. The question is not which software is most capable in the abstract. It is which one runs a correct Maltese pay run with the least effort from you.

A short set of questions for any vendor

Take these to every demo:

  • Show me an FSS calculation on a Maltese example, with tax status and the current bands.
  • How do you produce the FS5, FS3, and FS7, and can you submit them?
  • Where is our payroll data hosted, and who can restrict who sees pay figures?
  • Where does support sit, and do they know Maltese payroll?
  • Show me hours flowing from attendance into the pay run.

The right answers are specific and demonstrated. Vague ones are their own answer.

Payroll is not where a Maltese business should spend its month. bitKode Payroll runs the FSS computation, both sides of the contribution, the statutory bonuses, and the FS5 and FS3. Attendance and leave feed straight in. Built for Maltese rules, supported locally.

Warehouse supervisor beside the biometric attendance clock, confident the team's hours are captured correctly

What an ATTLOG file is, and how to open or convert it

You export the attendance data from your fingerprint clock, open the file, and find a wall of numbers. No names, no columns, no dates you can read at a glance. Just rows like 1<TAB>2026-06-30 08:02:14<TAB>0<TAB>1<TAB>0. That is an ATTLOG file. It is more useful than it looks.

This article explains what an ATTLOG file contains, why it opens as an unreadable block, and the two ways to make it usable.

What an ATTLOG file is

ATTLOG is short for “attendance log”. It is the raw record a biometric attendance device writes every time someone clocks in or out. Most fingerprint and face-recognition clocks used by SMEs export it, including the widely deployed ZKTeco range. You get the file when you pull data off the device to a USB stick.

The file is plain text. Each line is one clocking event. Tab characters separate the values on that line, not commas. There are no column headings either. That is the first reason it looks so unhelpful when you double-click it.

What is actually inside each line

A typical ATTLOG line holds five pieces of information in a fixed order:

  1. User ID — the number the device assigns to an employee, not their name.
  2. Timestamp — the date and time of the clocking, usually as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.
  3. Status — a code for the type of clocking: in, out, break, or overtime.
  4. Verify mode — how the person identified themselves: fingerprint, card, face, or password.
  5. Work code — an optional field some businesses use to tag the reason for a clocking.

The status and verify columns are where most people get stuck, because they are stored as numbers. On most ZKTeco devices the status codes run 0 and 1 for check-in and check-out, 2 and 3 for break out and break in, then 4 and 5 for overtime. Verify mode commonly uses 1 for fingerprint, 2 for card, and 15 for face. These conventions vary between models. Check the codes against your own device manual before you rely on them for payroll.

The employee names are the other missing piece. The device stores names against user IDs internally, but the ATTLOG export gives you the IDs only. To make the file readable you need to map each ID back to a person.

Why it opens as gibberish

Double-clicking an ATTLOG file usually opens it in a plain text editor. That editor shows every tab and every raw code exactly as stored. Nothing formats it, nothing labels it, and nothing translates the status numbers into words. The information is all there. The presentation is the problem.

Two ways to make it readable

The manual route. Rename the file so it ends in .txt, open Excel, and import it as a tab-delimited file. Excel then splits the values into columns. This works, but it leaves you with the raw ID numbers and the raw status codes, so you still have to label the columns, translate the codes by hand, and match every ID to an employee. Do this once and it is a mild nuisance. Do it every payroll run and the minutes add up.

The quick route. We built a free ATTLOG converter that does the whole job in your browser. It reads the file, splits the columns, translates the status and verify codes into plain English, lets you sort the result, and exports it to CSV or Excel. The file never leaves your computer, because the conversion happens entirely in the browser rather than on a server, so nothing is uploaded anywhere. You can convert an ATTLOG file to Excel here.

When the export itself is the real cost

Reading one file is a small task. The problem is rarely one file.

Picture the monthly ritual. Someone visits the device with a USB stick. Every payroll run then starts with an export, a rename, an import, and a round of manual code translation. The cost is not the reading. It is the repetition, and the chance of a transcription error slipping into someone’s pay.

That is the point where a converter stops being enough and connected attendance starts to pay for itself. bitKode Attendance reads the same clock data automatically and feeds it into payroll. No export, no spreadsheet, no manual code lookup. The free tool solves today’s file. Connected attendance solves the cause.

For now, if you just need to read the file in front of you, the converter is here and free to use.