Payslip PDFs in Django

Why payslips become PDFs

A payslip is a personal financial record an employee keeps, uses to apply for credit, and expects to be able to open years later. That is the difference between a document and a view of a database, and it is why HR and payroll teams keep asking for this.

What a payslip has to carry

Before any of the code below matters, the template has to produce a document that is actually a payslip. These are the fields that make it one, and the ones a reader or an auditor will look for first.

• gross pay, itemised by basic, overtime and any allowances
• each deduction named separately with its own amount
• net pay, which is the number the employee checks first
• year-to-date totals for gross, tax and net
• the pay period and the payment date, which are not the same day
• the employee identifier and tax reference

Turning your the Django template language template into a document

You already have the markup. Render_to_string("invoices/detail.html", context) gives you it as a string, which is the only input the render needs. Django resolves {% static %} to a path relative to STATIC_URL, which means the stylesheet URL in your rendered HTML is only meaningful to a browser that already has a session on your host. A renderer fetching it from outside gets a 404 and produces an unstyled document. Inline the CSS into the string you send, or make STATIC_URL absolute for this one code path.

The Django implementation

httpx is the client most projects here already have. The render happens in a view that returns FileResponse, and you hand the bytes back as a FileResponse with an explicit content type.

# views.py
import httpx
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import FileResponse
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

from .models import Payslip


def payslip_pdf(request, pk):
    payslip = get_object_or_404(Payslip, pk=pk)

    # A template that extends nothing. The on-screen template carries base.html,
    # the nav and the messages block, none of which belong in a payslip.
    html = render_to_string("payslips/pdf.html", {"payslip": payslip})

    upstream = httpx.stream(
        "POST",
        "https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf",
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {settings.PDFPIPE_KEY}"},
        json={"html": html, "options": {"format": "A4", "printBackground": True}},
        timeout=60.0,
    )

    response = upstream.__enter__()
    response.raise_for_status()

    return FileResponse(
        response.iter_bytes(),
        content_type="application/pdf",
        filename=f"payslip-{payslip.reference}.pdf",
    )

The CSS that makes a payslip page correctly

The layout problem specific to this document is that gross, deductions and net must be visible together without scrolling or breaking, on one page, every time. These rules handle it.

/* Gross, deductions and net have to be visible together. One page,
   every time, regardless of how many deduction lines there are. */
.payslip { break-inside: avoid; }
.summary { break-inside: avoid; }

@page { size: A4; margin: 15mm; }

What goes wrong in Django

The template that renders your on-screen view is almost always the wrong one to send. It carries the base layout, the nav, and the messages framework, all of which land in the PDF. Render a template that extends nothing, and keep it beside the view template so the two do not drift.

What people try first

Most Django projects reach for WeasyPrint or xhtml2pdf, both of which put layout in your Python process. WeasyPrint needs Cairo and Pango in the image; xhtml2pdf supports a subset of CSS that stopped growing years ago. That works until it is running on more than one machine, at which point the browser becomes the thing you operate rather than the thing you use.

Where the payslip lives afterwards

Rendering is the short part. Payslips are personal financial records the employee will need for credit applications and tax filings for years. Employers commonly retain them for six years, and employees expect to be able to download an old one long after they have left.

Getting the document right

• Check net pay and the deduction breakdown, which is what an employee checks first and complains about immediately.
• Generation is triggered by a payroll run, producing every employee's document at once, so size the timeout for that path rather than for a health check.
• This is a batch shape: render the run through the batch endpoint rather than firing thousands of individual requests.
• Backgrounds are painted by default here, so a design that uses colour needs nothing set. Only an explicit print_background of false turns them off.

Frequently asked

Related

Other Django documents, and the same payslip in other stacks.