People
Add employees, board members and shareholders with the Estonian tax details the TSD declaration needs: ID code, basic exemption and II pillar pension rate.
Everyone your company pays — board members, employees and shareholders — lives under Payroll & Dividends → People. Arvello uses each person's details to calculate their payroll taxes correctly and to fill in the TSD, the monthly income and social tax declaration filed with EMTA (the Estonian Tax and Customs Board).
One person can hold several roles at once: a typical solo founder is board member and shareholder, and sometimes employee too.
Adding a person
Click Add Person and fill in:
- Name — first and last name, or the legal name and registry code if the shareholder is a company (legal entities can only be shareholders)
- Personal ID code (isikukood) — the 11-digit Estonian identification code, required for Estonian residents and for TSD filing
- Bank IBAN and bank name — where their net pay goes
- Email — used for emailing payslips
- Role(s) — board member (with a monthly gross fee and start date), employee (with a monthly gross salary, start date and position), shareholder (with an ownership percentage)
Under Tax Settings you record what drives the calculation: whether they are an Estonian tax resident, whether they apply the basic exemption with your company (€700 per month in 2026 — a person can apply it with only one employer), their II pillar funded pension rate (2%, 4% or 6%; Arvello offers an automatic check, and if that's unavailable you pick the rate manually), and their payslip language — Estonian or English.
ℹ️Employment Register
Employee or board member — the tax difference
Social tax of 33% applies to both. The difference is unemployment insurance and the funded pension: salaries carry employee unemployment insurance of 1.6% and employer unemployment insurance of 0.8%, plus any II pillar contribution; board member fees carry neither — no unemployment insurance on either side, and no II pillar deduction.
The same €1,000 gross, paid each way in 2026 (resident, €700 basic exemption applied):
| Board fee | Salary | |
|---|---|---|
| Gross | €1,000.00 | €1,000.00 |
| Income tax (22% after exemption) | €66.00 | €66.00 |
| Employee unemployment (1.6%) | — | €16.00 |
| Net paid out | €934.00 | €918.00 |
| Social tax (33%, employer) | €330.00 | €330.00 |
| Employer unemployment (0.8%) | — | €8.00 |
| Total cost to company | €1,330.00 | €1,338.00 |
The board fee costs the company slightly less and pays out slightly more — but the person accrues no unemployment insurance entitlement from it.
What the TSD needs per person
Each payment appears as a row on TSD Annex 1 with the person's ID code, name, a payment type code (salary, board fee, bonus and so on), the gross amount, basic exemption applied, and the income tax, social tax, unemployment insurance and pension figures. Dividend recipients appear on Annex 7 with their ID code (or registry code for companies), net amount and ownership percentage. If the ID code is missing, the return can't be completed — hence the form nagging you for it.
When someone leaves
When a board member steps down, edit the person and set the Board Member Until date. The People list shows each person as Active or Inactive, and only active people are pulled into new payroll runs — and anyone not being paid in a particular month can simply be removed from that month's run before it's created. Their payment history, payslips and past TSD entries stay exactly where they are.
You can also remove a person entirely, but this is permanent and only sensible for someone added by mistake — a person with payment history is part of your tax records and can't simply vanish.
⚠️Disclaimer