HR software for business owners
No HR team, no time for one. You need salaries right, PF and ESI applied, and records that survive an inspection, in minutes a month, not days.
What business owners get from PeopleDeck
One system for attendance, leave, onboarding and payroll, with PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS applied to every payslip and upload-ready return files generated from the run. Priced per employee, per month, so it fits before you have scale.
Built around your month
- ✓ Payroll runs that apply PF, ESI, PT and TDS without you knowing the sections
- ✓ Attendance and leave that police themselves with rules you set once
- ✓ Audit-ready records without maintaining a single register by hand
- ✓ PF, ESI, PT and TDS applied to every payslip, with upload-ready files, never filed on your behalf
- ✓ Employee self-service for payslips, Form 16 data and leave balances
Your month, week by week
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1
Payday without dependence
The run computes from attendance and structures; you review a preview where variances are flagged in plain terms and approve from your phone if that's where you are. No single employee's spreadsheet knowledge stands between your team and their salaries.
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2
Compliance without a department
PF, ESI, PT and TDS apply themselves at current rates; upload-ready files land with your CA. Your exposure drops not because you learned the sections but because the arithmetic stopped being manual.
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3
Records without registers
Wage registers, contribution histories and payslip archives accumulate as a by-product of paying people. When an inspector or a buyer's auditor asks, the evidence exports; you never maintained it, it maintained itself.
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4
Growth without re-work
Hiring five people next quarter means five checklists, not a new process. Per-employee pricing keeps the bill proportional, and the payroll process you set up at twenty employees is the same one that runs at two hundred.
What this looks like in practice
Concretely: a 40-person distributor's owner approves payroll from the airport on the 30th — preview scanned, two variances explained (a joiner's pro-rata, an approved advance), one tap. The CA receives generated ECR and challan files the same evening. Last year this took the owner two evenings and a reconciliation argument; the difference is not effort relocated but effort deleted. And when the owner finally takes a two-week holiday, payroll runs anyway: the manager previews, the owner approves from a beach with one tap, and the business learns that its payday never depended on anyone's desk. That resilience, more than the saved evenings, is what owners say they were actually buying.
Built for you if
- ✓ You run 10-200 employees with no dedicated HR function
- ✓ Payroll currently depends on one person, one sheet, or you personally
- ✓ You want compliance handled without wanting to understand it
Not the fit if
- ✕ You want someone else to own the decisions: the tool computes, you still approve
- ✕ You need multi-country payroll — PeopleDeck is built for Indian statute
Mechanism deep-dives: the payroll engine · attendance & leave · self-service
Ninety days in
Ninety days in, the change reads on your calendar rather than the software. Month one costs you a few evenings — importing your people, encoding the salary structures you have been carrying in your head, and running the system in parallel with whatever you used before. Month two is when the parallel sheet retires, because the run reconciled and the sheet did not add anything except labour. Month three is the first month payroll happens to you rather than through you: a notification, a preview scan, an approval, done. The compounding effect is subtler, every month adds a layer of clean records under the business, so the loan application, the tender's compliance annexure or the buyer's diligence request that eventually arrives meets an export button instead of a scramble. Owners rarely buy payroll software for the records; a year later the records are usually what they mention first.
Where PeopleDeck stops, deliberately
Be clear-eyed about what stays yours. PeopleDeck computes, evidences and prepares; it does not decide who gets an increment, whether an advance is granted, or when a probation converts; those enter the system as your decisions and come out documented. It generates every statutory file in upload-ready form but never touches a government portal on your behalf, so authority over what gets filed stays exactly where the law puts it: with you and your CA. And it is not a labour-law adviser; it applies current rates correctly, but whether your contract structure or your contractor classifications are right is a question for a professional, made easier because the facts are now organised.
A different seat at the table?
Running a school or college? Staff payroll belongs inside your ERP: SchoolDeck staff payroll or CampusAlly payroll.
Frequently asked questions
I have no HR background, is this usable?
Yes. You set rules once (working days, leave policy, salary structure) and the system applies them. Statutory treatment is applied automatically to every payslip.
What happens when an inspector asks for records?
Wage registers, contribution records and payslip history export directly: the records exist because the system generated them, not because someone remembered to.
How is PeopleDeck priced?
Simply: active employees times a per-employee monthly rate, in rupees. Everything is included for everyone, and the current rate appears at sign-up rather than in a sales call.
Does PeopleDeck file PF and ESI returns?
No. It applies the contributions to every payslip and generates upload-ready ECR and return files; the uploads themselves stay with you or your consultant, so nothing reaches a portal without sign-off.
How much of my time does payroll actually take with this?
Typically the preview-and-approve sitting; most owners report minutes, because exceptions are flagged rather than hunted. The month's compliance rides along automatically.
What if my CA has questions about the numbers?
Every figure carries its working (attendance days, component math, statutory basis) so your CA audits reasoning, not screenshots.
Can my accountant or CA get their own access?
Yes — scoped access for an external accountant is a normal setup: they see runs, registers and statutory files without touching employee records or approvals, which keeps the working relationship intact and the audit trail clean.
Is my data safe with a small vendor?
Your records live in India-hosted infrastructure with access controls and export rights; you can pull your complete data at any time, so you are never locked in by hostage records.
Your month, minus the spreadsheets.
Per employee, per month: attendance to upload-ready returns.
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