A 150-Person Factory's Payroll Workbook, Start to Sent
Multiple pay components. One multi-tab Excel workbook. Here's what changes when the Salary Pipeline replaces manual PDF creation.
This is a walkthrough of a realistic scenario built around Sheldon Sender's Salary Pipeline feature — not a specific named customer. Numbers are estimates based on typical batch sizes and documented product behaviour, not measured results from a single company.
A Mid-Size Manufacturing Team
Picture an HR team at a mid-size manufacturer — around 150 factory workers across two shifts. Payroll runs through a single Excel workbook: a Master tab with computed base salary, overtime, shift allowance, and production bonus for every worker; a Staff List tab with names and personal emails; and a Password tab with a unique PDF password per employee, used because payslips contain sensitive salary figures shared on a factory floor.
Every pay period, someone has to turn that Master tab into 150 individual, correctly password-protected PDFs — then get each one to the right inbox without mixing up a single file.
Turning one spreadsheet into 150 correct, private PDFs
This is the part of payroll that Excel was never built to do — and it's where most of the monthly time and risk lives.
No native way to turn rows into PDFs
Excel can calculate salary perfectly, but it has no built-in path from '150 rows in a Master tab' to '150 separate, formatted payslip PDFs.' That step is typically done by hand or with a fragile macro.
Password protection adds a manual layer
Because payslips carry sensitive figures, each PDF needs its own password before it leaves the building. Applying 150 different passwords by hand is slow and easy to get wrong — a mismatched password is as bad as a mismatched recipient.
Two different data sources to reconcile
Salary figures live in the Master tab; emails live in the Staff List tab. Manually cross-referencing employee IDs between the two, for every one of 150 workers, is exactly the kind of repetitive task where mistakes creep in.
SMTP setup is its own project
Before any of this can be emailed, someone typically has to configure an App Password or SMTP settings — a task that stalls on IT tickets at companies without a dedicated administrator.
From workbook to sent inbox, without manual PDF creation
This is what the same monthly task looks like using Sheldon Sender's Salary Pipeline, built specifically for multi-tab salary workbooks like this one.
Import the workbook as-is
The HR team opens the Salary Pipeline and points it at the existing Excel file — no reformatting. Sheldon Sender scans every tab and auto-detects which one is the Master data, which is the Staff List, and which holds passwords, based on column headers and content, in either English or Vietnamese.
Confirm the auto-detected column mapping
Sheldon Sender maps base salary, overtime, shift allowance, production bonus, deductions, and net pay automatically, and shows a preview to confirm before generating anything.
Generate 150 password-protected PDFs in one batch
One click generates a payslip PDF for every row in the Master tab, each automatically encrypted with that employee's password from the Password tab — no manual file-by-file work.
Connect Gmail once, then send
With Gmail connected via one-click OAuth (no App Password, no SMTP fields), the batch of 150 personalised emails goes out with a real-time progress bar, followed by a per-employee delivery report.
The manual bottleneck removed, not just the sending step
The estimates below reflect the order of magnitude typical for a batch this size, based on how the Salary Pipeline and send flow are designed to perform — not a measured result from one company.
PDF creation stops being a bottleneck
The step that used to require touching each employee's file individually is replaced by one batch generation run — the biggest source of manual time in this scenario.
Passwords are no longer a manual risk
Every PDF gets its own password automatically, sourced directly from the workbook's Password tab — removing the chance of a copy-paste mistake on a sensitive document.
No IT ticket to start sending
One-click Gmail connect means a team without dedicated IT support can be ready to send the same day, instead of waiting on an App Password or SMTP configuration.
See how this fits your own payroll workbook
Try the Salary Pipeline free for 14 days — 50 sends included, no credit card required.