# A draft payroll contract, reviewed and explicitly activated Continuing from [Interview feedback, an approved offer, and a new hire](https://docs.blueonehr.com/books/enterprise/page/interview-feedback-an-approved-offer-and-a-new-hire): converting an accepted offer into an employee record also creates a **draft** payroll contract. Nothing is payable yet. This page covers the one screen that reviews that contract against the offer it came from, and the one explicit action that turns it into something payroll can use. *Illustrative demonstration prepared using publicly available company context and synthetic data. This page does not represent a production deployment, customer endorsement, or use of real employee data.*

Accepted offer to payroll contract: the protected handoff

## The company this page follows Same illustrative demo structure as the rest of this book: one fictional company, Meridian Interiors. Its name, its roles and every person shown are synthetic; none of it represents a real customer, a real headcount or a real payroll figure. ## A frozen copy of the offer, not a new form The draft contract's review screen does not ask anyone to re-enter the package. It shows a frozen copy of exactly what the candidate accepted — position, effective date, the annual CTC, and the same basic/HRA split the compensation engine computed when the offer was raised — next to the contract's own current state (Draft, or Active once someone has activated it). Reviewing this screen is how HR confirms the contract matches the offer before doing anything with it. ## Activation is a deliberate, explicit, audited action Nothing in this chain auto-activates. A visible "Activate contract" action is the only way a draft contract starts being payable, and the system records exactly who did it and when, shown back on the same screen afterward. Nothing about *who* may click it is restricted to a different person from the one who converted the candidate — but every illustrative example in this book happens to use someone else anyway, the same maker-checker habit this book uses for requisitions and offers: a different approver, a different authority, a second pair of eyes before anything becomes payable. ## What changes the moment it's activated The contract's own status flips immediately, and so does the surrounding product: the employee's record reflects an active contract right away, and that employee now appears wherever the product lists employees with an active contract. This part of the product answers "is this contract active" with a live, direct check every time it's asked — there's nothing cached or batched about it. A separate, independent system also *notices* an employee who has no active contract yet and raises that as something for HR to look at — but that system works by periodically re-checking the company's roster, not by reacting the instant a contract changes. Expect a short delay, not an instant update, from that separate observation — the contract and the employee record themselves are already correct the moment the action completes. ## Mitra recommends; it never activates Mitra can read everything above and tell HR what it means — including flagging an employee with no active contract as something to look at. It does not have, and does not use, any action that activates a payroll contract. The activation shown in this story is a human action, taken on this screen, by a named person, every time. ## Related reading - [Interview feedback, an approved offer, and a new hire](https://docs.blueonehr.com/books/enterprise/page/interview-feedback-an-approved-offer-and-a-new-hire) - [The connected HR lifecycle](https://docs.blueonehr.com/books/enterprise/page/the-connected-hr-lifecycle)