Most payroll software is designed for a payroll department. You do not have one. Here is what to check when the person running payroll is also running the company.
For a business of 5–200 employees, payroll software should do one thing above all: compute pay from attendance that is already recorded, so nobody re-types days into a salary sheet. Everything else — statutory components, payslip distribution, self-service, an audit trail — follows from that. The checklist below is ordered by how often the item turns out to matter a year in, with the questions to ask a vendor and the answers that should end the conversation.
Enterprise payroll suites are built around a payroll team, a workflow with approvals at four levels, and a compliance department that needs 40 reports. A small business has an office manager or founder, one approver, and needs six numbers to be right by the 7th. Buying the suite means paying for the workflow and then working around it.
What the small business needs is narrower and harder: attendance and leave captured daily by employees themselves, a salary structure per person with effective dates, a computation that handles LOP and arrears correctly, a payslip per employee that they can fetch themselves, and a record that survives an audit. HRMS, payroll software or attendance app? covers the category question; this article assumes you have decided payroll is the pain.
Payroll computation is producing the correct register and slips. Statutory filing is submitting PF ECRs, ESI returns, TDS challans and 24Q from that register. Some software does both; many small businesses already have a CA or consultant who does the second half well and cheaply. The mistake is paying a software vendor for filing and a consultant for the same filing. Decide first, then evaluate — and either way, make sure the register the filer needs is a one-click export. The compliance calendar lists what gets filed when.
Pick five real employees, including one on a mid-month joining date and one with a salary revision. Have them mark attendance for two weeks and request one leave each. Then run a payroll for the fortnight and compare every line to what you would have computed by hand. Where the numbers differ, one of you is wrong — find out which. A vendor who declines this test has told you something. The 30-day migration plan picks up from a successful trial.
| First question | Where do paid days come from — recorded in-system, or uploaded? |
|---|---|
| Hardest cases to test | Mid-month joiner · two-day LOP · backdated revision with arrears |
| Must-have components | Basic, HRA, other allowance, PT, PF/ESI where applicable, TDS, incentives, arrears |
| Distribution | One slip per employee, stored as issued, self-service download |
| Red flags | Attendance upload · browser-side math · no effective dates · trial-sized free tier · compulsory filing add-on |
| Trial length | Two weeks with five real employees, then a hand-checked payroll |
The best choice is the one that computes pay from attendance recorded in the same system, handles loss of pay, mid-month revisions and arrears correctly, produces individual payslips employees can download themselves, and lets you export everything. Evaluate against those criteria with your own employees' numbers rather than against a feature list; a two-week trial with five real employees will tell you more than any comparison table.
At ten employees a careful spreadsheet can produce correct pay, but the time goes into reconciling attendance, leave and salary changes each month rather than into the arithmetic. If that reconciliation takes more than an hour or has produced an error in the last three months, software that links attendance to payroll will pay for itself immediately — and the Code on Wages deadline of the 7th makes the reconciliation window shorter.
It can be, if the free tier is designed for real use rather than as a trial — unlimited employees, no history cutoff, payslips and export included. Check what the free tier caps and what happens to your data if you stop. A free tier limited to five users or thirty days is a demo.
Only if you do not already have someone who does. Many small businesses have a consultant who files accurately and cheaply from the payroll register; paying a software vendor for the same filing duplicates the cost. Decide first whether you want software that files or software that produces a clean register for your filer, and make sure the register exports in one step.
Payroll software computes pay and produces payslips; an HRMS covers the wider employee lifecycle — records, attendance, leave, onboarding, performance — with payroll as one module. For a small business the useful distinction is whether attendance and payroll share one dataset, because that is what removes the monthly re-keying regardless of what the product is called.
Run a two-week trial with five real employees, deliberately including a mid-month joiner and someone with a salary revision. Let them mark attendance and request leave, then run a payroll and compare every line to a hand calculation. Any difference is either your error or the software's, and you need to know which before you migrate.
Merik is built for the checklist above rather than for a payroll department. Employees self sign-up and mark their own attendance with geolocated check-in; leave and work-from-home are requests with approvals; payroll is computed on the server from those days, with basic, HRA, other allowance, professional tax, LOP, incentives and arrears, and salary revisions carry effective dates. Payslips are generated and emailed individually or in bulk, and employees download their own.
Where Merik stops: it does not file PF, ESI or TDS returns — it produces the register your consultant files from. The workspace is free with unlimited employee self sign-up and no card, tenant isolation is enforced in the database, and the task log exports to CSV. Compare against your own numbers with the ROI calculator, or read what the free workspace includes.
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