Hello there,
I understand you require a payroll application, and needs to be made using PHP and MySQL. The same can be made with Laravel (a PHP framework), that would greatly improve the efficiency of the program and can also be customisable.
Also you may consider NodeJS and MongoDB for the same project too, because of the event-loop mechanism in NodeJS (which allows it to perform non-blocking I/O operations), if your project has to handle a lot of data, your application will remain fast and will make sure that every request is processed. But if time is a concern, I'd suggest PHP and MySQL. Please feel free to text me using the chat feature so that we can discuss more on this.
On that note, all the best for your project.
Thanks and Regards,
Samay Bhattacharyya.