ContactPoint360 doesn't just run a call center. It's the frontline CX operation for some of the world's most recognizable Fortune 500 brands, across 10 delivery centers in 9 countries, in 36 languages. Every one of those brand interactions is handled by an agent who is, at the end of the day, just trying to know what they're going to get paid.
I was 17 when the payroll head came to me with a request that had nothing to do with numbers at first. He wanted an agent pay calculator, something that would let people see their own pay before payday. A tool for transparency.
In a BPO, employee relations run on exactly that: whether people believe the company is treating them right. Payroll touches every single employee, every cycle, whether they're supporting a Fortune 500 airline or a healthcare client on the other side of the world. If trust breaks there, it breaks everywhere.
So I got to work on what sounded simple on paper: a tool that could show every employee exactly how their pay was calculated.
The question behind the question
The most common question Finance got wasn't about a missing payment. It was "why is my pay this amount?" That question should have a simple answer. It usually didn't, not because anything was wrong, but because nobody outside Finance could see how the number was built.
The rules underneath a Philippine payslip
- Ordinary day night differential: hourly rate × hours × 10%
- Ordinary day overtime: hourly rate × hours × 25%
- Rest day work: full shift at 1.3× the hourly rate
- Rest day night differential: an extra 13% stacked on top
- Rest day overtime: 1.69×, three things compounding at once
- Regular holiday: a full extra day, plus 26% night differential
- Special holiday: a 30% add-on, plus 13% night differential
- Optional deductions (cash advance, HMO, eyeglasses): off gross income
- Statutory deductions (SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG): off take-home and off taxable income
- H1 gross taxable income has to stay unreduced, because H2 needs that exact figure to calculate withholding tax
Ten line items, two kinds of deductions that behave differently, and a tax calculation that depends on getting the order right. That's a lot of rules for one number on a payslip. It's exactly why it's so easy to get wrong, and so hard for anyone outside Finance to check.
What I built
A calculator that shows its work instead of hiding it. Someone enters their monthly rate and their hours, and the tool walks through every line the same way payroll does: hourly rate, hours worked, multiplier, subtotal, all the way down to net pay. Nothing collapsed into one final number nobody can check.
I've made the calculator available to use, and open-sourced the code behind it:
Try the calculator → View the code on GitHub →
All calculations run locally in your browser, nothing you enter is ever transmitted or stored. The accounting rules are public. Anyone running Philippine payroll is welcome to use it, fork it, or if I got something wrong, tell me.
The bigger picture
This was never really a calculator problem. Payroll is one of the few processes that touches every employee, every single cycle, without exception. Most systems don't get that kind of universal, recurring contact with trust. And what struck me was that nobody had to force this project into existence. The payroll head asked for it, unprompted, specifically because he wanted agents to trust their pay before a single question ever came in.
That instinct says a lot about a company whose entire business is representing other brands. The agents on these floors are the actual voice of Fortune 500 companies to their customers, every call, every chat, every shift. A company that goes out of its way to make sure those same agents can see and trust their own paycheck is investing in the people behind its service quality, not just the process.
Transparency here isn't a nice-to-have. It's one of the clearest signs of a company that actually looks out for the people doing the work.
This was the last of the three payroll and compliance workflows I worked on at ContactPoint360. All three came down to the same thing: most processes that feel complicated aren't. They're just invisible. Make them visible, and most of the problem disappears with them.