A practical monthly process for founders and office managers running payroll for a 10-50 person team.
Payroll feels intimidating mostly because it's unfamiliar, not because it's complicated. For most small teams, the core calculation is a handful of numbers repeated every month. Here's the process.
Confirm the month's attendance and leave are accurate before calculating pay — this is the input everything else depends on.
Make sure any salary revision is applied from its correct effective month, not retroactively guessed at payday.
Gross pay minus deductions (statutory + unpaid leave) equals net pay. This should be a repeatable formula, not a manual recalculation each month.
Every employee should receive a clear payslip showing how their number was reached — see what a payslip should contain.
The goal isn't to avoid payroll software or advisors forever — it's to stop re-deriving the same calculation by hand every single month.
You don't need an accountant to calculate net pay from attendance and CTC. You do want professional input once statutory filings (PF, ESI, TDS returns) enter the picture — see the compliance checklist for what that involves.
Merik automates the repeatable part: it reads attendance and leave, applies each employee's current CTC, and calculates gross, deductions and net pay every month — so running payroll becomes reviewing numbers, not recalculating them. Avoid the common payroll mistakes that come from doing this by hand.
PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS — what to get right each month.
The recurring errors that cost time, money and employee trust.
How connecting attendance and leave directly to payroll removes errors.
