Ask AI Malaysian Payroll Questions: The Free HavaHR MCP for Cursor, Claude & ChatGPT

Ask a general AI chatbot to calculate EPF on RM4,000 and you will often get a confident answer built on outdated rates, the wrong wage band, or a made-up rounding rule. Large language models are good at explaining payroll concepts and bad at looking up the KWSP Third Schedule. The fix is not a smarter prompt — it is giving the model a real calculator to call.

That is what the HavaHR Malaysia Payroll MCP does. It is a free, MIT-licensed npm package that plugs ten Malaysian payroll and HR calculators into Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT desktop, VS Code, Windsurf, or Zed. It runs locally, sends nothing over the network, and uses the same calculation engine that powers the free HavaHR web calculators.

Why AI gets Malaysian payroll wrong

Malaysian statutory deductions are table-driven, not formula-driven. SOCSO and EIS use PERKESO wage brackets, EPF follows the KWSP Third Schedule with special rates for employees aged 60 and above, and PCB is a multi-step MTD computation with reliefs and category codes. A language model reproducing these from memory will interpolate — and interpolation looks exactly like a correct answer until you compare it against the official table.

This matters most for the people most likely to ask an AI: a founder budgeting their first hire, an admin double-checking a payslip, an accountant sanity-checking an offer letter. A wrong SOCSO band or an outdated minimum wage assumption quietly propagates into real decisions.

What an MCP server is (in one paragraph)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI applications call external tools. An MCP server exposes functions — here, payroll calculators — with typed inputs and outputs. When you ask “what is the employer cost of a RM5,000 hire?”, the AI recognises it should call calculate_employer_cost, passes the salary, and presents the structured result. The model handles language; the calculator handles arithmetic. Each does what it is actually good at.

The ten calculators you get

Version 0.2.0 of @havahr/mcp-calculatorsships ten tools, all running the shared engine behind HavaHR's web calculators:

The four newest tools go beyond monthly contributions: overtime and public holiday pay under the Employment Act 1955 (including the 104-hour monthly OT cap check), annual leave proration for mid-year joiners, the RM4,000 EA coverage test, and the HRD Corp levy with its mandatory-versus-voluntary registration rules.

Install in two minutes

Every host uses the same one-liner. For Cursor or Claude Desktop, add this to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "havahr-calculators": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@havahr/mcp-calculators"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code and Codex have CLI shortcuts (claude mcp add / codex mcp add), and VS Code, Windsurf, and Zed each take the equivalent config in their own settings file. The install guide has copy-paste snippets for all seven hosts, plus a note on why chatgpt.com in the browser is the one place this does not work.

Prompts to try

Once installed, ask naturally — the AI picks the right tool:

• “What is the take-home pay on RM4,500 for a single Malaysian employee?”
• “How much does a RM5,000 hire actually cost the company per month?”
• “How much overtime pay for 10 OT hours on a RM2,600 salary?”
• “Prorate 12 days annual leave for someone who joined on 1 July.”
• “Is a RM4,200 supervisor covered by the Employment Act?”
• “What is the HRD Corp levy for 20 staff with RM80,000 total wages?”

What it is (and is not) for

The MCP is built for estimates: budgeting a hire, sanity-checking a payslip, comparing offers, or answering an employee's “why is my PCB this amount?” question with real numbers. It is deliberately not a filing tool — statutory submissions still happen in the KWSP, PERKESO, and LHDN portals, and monthly payroll for a real team needs per-employee records, payslips, and an audit trail.

That second half is what HavaHR does: the same statutory engine, applied automatically to every employee, every month, with payslips and Borang EA generated from one record.

Final takeaway

You do not need to stop asking AI about Malaysian payroll — you need to stop letting it guess. Install @havahr/mcp-calculators once, and every EPF, SOCSO, EIS, PCB, overtime, leave, and HRD Corp question your assistant answers is computed, not remembered. Start at the Malaysia Payroll MCP install guide, or try the same calculators in the browser at payroll calculator Malaysia.