Best HR and Payroll Software for a 100-Employee Company in India

What changes when a company reaches 100 employees

Up to about 20 people, HR runs on a spreadsheet and the owner's memory. At 100 it stops working. Leave balances disagree, one person's attendance correction is lost in a chat, and every month-end payroll takes days because the inputs arrive from five places. At the same time the legal side grows: an establishment of this size is usually covered by Provident Fund, ESI where wages qualify, gratuity, the maternity benefit rules and the internal committee requirement under the POSH Act, and in most states professional tax and labour welfare fund as well.

That is why the choice at this size is less about features and more about whether one or two HR people can run everything correctly, every month, without outside help. The rest of this guide is a practical way to test that.

Payroll compliance: what the software must calculate

Ask the vendor to show each of these on your own data, not on a demo company. A wrong figure here becomes a notice, a penalty or an unhappy employee.

• Provident Fund (PF): the employee and employer share, how the PF wage ceiling is applied, an option for contributing on actual wages, and the monthly return file. The deposit and return are due by the 15th of the following month.
• ESI: eligibility depends on monthly wages, so people move in and out of cover as their pay changes. Check that the software handles a person who crosses the wage limit in the middle of a contribution period. Contributions are due by the 15th of the next month.
• TDS on salary (Section 192): projected tax for the year, both tax regimes, investment declarations, and what happens when someone joins in October with income from a previous employer.
• Professional tax: slabs differ by state, so a company with staff in two states needs both applied correctly.
• Payslips and bank file: a branded payslip per employee and one bulk transfer file for the bank, instead of typing 100 amounts into net banking.
• Full and final settlement: notice period, leave encashment and gratuity for people who leave, since a payroll tool that cannot do exits leaves HR back in Excel.

Rates, wage ceilings and due dates are revised from time to time. Treat the figures here as a checklist of what to verify and confirm the current values on the EPFO, ESIC and your state tax department sites.

Attendance and leave: where the monthly problems start

Payroll is only as good as the attendance behind it. Most month-end disputes at 100 employees come from three things: a person who forgot to clock out, a half day that was never recorded, and leave that was approved on a message but not in the system.

So test the attendance side the way your staff will actually use it. Can an employee mark attendance from a phone, and can you require the location to match the office or a client site? Can a manager approve a missed punch in one tap? Do shifts and rosters exist if you have a warehouse or a support team on rotation? Are leave types, half days, holidays and carry forward configurable by you, without asking the vendor?

The attendance and leave data should flow into payroll on its own, including loss of pay, so nobody re-enters it at month end.

Approvals should reach managers, not only HR

With 100 people you have team leads and department heads, and HR should not be the bottleneck for every leave request, work from home day or expense claim. Check that the person an employee reports to receives the request, can approve it, and that HR still sees everything. Also check what happens when a manager is on leave themselves.

Moving 100 employees onto a new system, step by step

A realistic rollout for a company this size is a few days of preparation and one parallel payroll, not a long project. Work through these in order:

• Clean the employee master first: full name as per PAN, PAN, UAN, ESI number where it exists, bank account and IFSC, date of joining, department and reporting manager. Most import errors come from this sheet.
• Set up the salary structures: basic, allowances, deductions, and which components count towards PF and ESI. Do this per grade or role, not per person.
• Define leave policies, holidays, shifts and attendance rules, including the working days that make up a month.
• Import the employees, then invite them so they can log in to their own self-service page.
• Run one payroll in parallel with your current method and compare every employee's net pay. Fix the differences, then switch over.

How to compare the cost fairly

Vendors price in two ways: per employee per month, or a plan that includes a number of employees. For 100 people, work out the yearly figure for each option in the same way: the monthly price, multiplied by the headcount if it is per employee, multiplied by twelve. Then add everything that is billed separately: payroll, attendance and invoicing modules, extra branches, setup or training, and any price rise once you cross the plan's employee limit.

For illustration only: a tool charging an amount per employee per month at 100 employees costs that amount multiplied by 100 each month, so a small difference in the per-employee price becomes a large yearly difference, while a flat plan stays the same until its limit. Ask what happens at employee number 101.

Where TeamEzz HRMS fits

TeamEzz HRMS covers payroll with PF, ESI, TDS and professional tax, payslips and statutory and bank files, attendance with location and shifts, leave with approvals, and a self-service login for every employee. If you also invoice customers or track sales leads, GST invoicing, expenses and a client CRM are in the same subscription instead of a second tool.

Plans list their employee limits and prices openly on the pricing page, and every account starts with a free trial that does not ask for a credit card, so you can run a real payroll month on your own data before you decide.