WPS payroll in Qatar: how the SIF file works

The Wage Protection System requires you to submit a Salary Information File to your bank each month. The bank validates it and pays your staff. If the file fails validation, nobody gets paid on time.

What the file contains

One record per employee, carrying:

• Qatar ID number, eleven digits, no spaces.
• Visa or work permit identifier.
• Employee name, matching the bank record.
• The employee's bank short code.
• IBAN, starting QA and twenty-nine characters in total.
• Number of working days in the period.
• Net salary, basic salary, overtime, extra income and deductions, each to two decimals.

Plus a header record identifying the employer and the establishment.

Why files get rejected

In order of how often we see it:

1. A missing or malformed IBAN. One employee without one fails the whole file in some bank validators.
2. Qatar ID not exactly eleven digits, usually because a spreadsheet stripped a leading zero.
3. Name mismatch between your HR record and the bank account.
4. Amounts with thousands separators or more than two decimals.
5. Working days not matching the pay period.

Getting it right in the system

The file should be generated from payroll, not maintained separately. That means the IBAN, QID and bank code live on the employee record and are validated when they are entered — not discovered to be wrong on the 27th of the month.

A good implementation also lists the employees it had to exclude, on screen, before producing the file. Silently dropping a record is how someone goes unpaid.

Bank formats differ and they change. Confirm the current layout with your bank before the first run, and again after any bank-side system change.