HR software for startup founders
Hiring is going faster than process. PeopleDeck lets you onboard this week's joiners, pay everyone correctly and stay compliant — without hiring HR before you need to.
What startup founders 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
- ✓ Offer-to-onboarded in a day, with records created as a side effect
- ✓ Salary structures that survive your next fundraise and headcount jump
- ✓ PF, ESI and TDS applied from employee one, no compliance debt to fix later
- ✓ 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
Hire this week, compliant this week
Offer accepted → checklist → payroll-ready. PF and ESI apply from employee one, so the compliance debt that quietly accumulates in early-stage spreadsheets never starts.
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2
Structures that survive scaling
Bands defined once absorb the next ten offers; revisions apply forward with effect dates. The payroll you set up at eight people is the one that runs at eighty, no re-platforming at Series A.
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3
The founder stops being the system
Payslips, balances and declarations move to self-service; approvals route to whoever should actually approve. You stay the approver of the run, not the operator of the process.
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4
Diligence without archaeology
When the round happens, salary histories, ESOP-adjacent cash components and statutory evidence export cleanly. The absence of payroll surprises is itself a diligence signal.
What this looks like in practice
Concretely: a 14-person startup's founder makes three offers in a fortnight. Each acceptance opens a checklist; each joiner hits their first payday computed pro-rata with statutory lines applied; the founder's involvement was signing offers and approving one run. At the seed extension six months later, the payroll folder in the data room is an export, not an apology. By the time the team crosses thirty, the founder has made exactly one payroll-related hire decision: none. The process that would have demanded an office manager or an outsourced bureau at the old error rate simply kept running at the new one.
Built for you if
- ✓ You are pre-HR-hire and payroll is currently you
- ✓ Headcount will double and you don't want process debt
- ✓ Investors will eventually read your payroll records
Not the fit if
- ✕ You want ESOP administration — grants record as line items; valuation and vesting live in cap-table tooling
- ✕ You want a free-forever tool at any scale — pricing is per employee, honest and small at your size
Mechanism deep-dives: the payroll engine · attendance & leave · self-service
Ninety days in
Ninety days in, payroll has become boring, which is the point. Month one you set up bands instead of individual salaries, a decision that feels like overkill at twelve people and turns out to be the whole game at forty, because every offer since has been a band selection rather than a negotiation artifact. Month two the first joiners flow through end to end: offer, checklist, pro-rata first payslip with PF applied, no founder involvement beyond the signature. Month three you notice the absence, no reconciliation evening, no 'wait, did we deduct PT for the Bangalore hire?', no compliance anxiety humming under the growth. The compounding asset is the record: every month of clean payroll is a month of diligence you will never have to reconstruct, and founders who have been through a priced round know that the data room's HR folder is either an export or a week of apologising. That is the pattern worth noticing: the system did not save the founder time so much as it deleted a category of founder work before it could calcify into someone's job.
Where PeopleDeck stops, deliberately
Know what stays founder work. PeopleDeck will not tell you what to pay anyone — bands, offers and revisions are your calls, recorded with effect dates once made. Equity stays in your cap-table tool; cash components of compensation live here, grants and vesting live there, and the two meet only in the offer letter you write. Statutory files generate in upload-ready form from day one, but filing authority stays with you and whoever advises you — which, at seed stage, is exactly the discipline investors want to see: a founder who approves, on the record, rather than a process nobody owns.
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
When should a startup move off spreadsheet payroll?
Before the first PF-liable hire. Contribution mistakes compound monthly, and fixing history is far more painful than starting clean.
Is this the same as your startup company page?
This page is about you, the founder-buyer. The startups solution covers company-type fit, same product, different lens.
How is PeopleDeck priced?
Per employee, per month, in rupees. The bill follows your active headcount and nothing else: no module bundles, no per-branch fees, and the rate is shown transparently at sign-up.
Does PeopleDeck file PF and ESI returns?
No. Every payslip carries the applied contributions and every run produces upload-ready files, but the filing step never happens behind your back; it is yours, with your consultant in the loop.
When exactly should we move off the spreadsheet?
Before the first PF-liable hire — contribution errors compound monthly and history is painful to repair. Starting clean is dramatically cheaper than cleaning up.
Does it slow us down day-to-day?
The opposite direction: offers to payroll-ready without re-entry, and the founder's payroll involvement drops to one approval a month.
We're 6 people, is this premature?
Six with a PF-liable hire coming is precisely the moment: per-employee pricing means you pay almost nothing now, and you never accumulate the spreadsheet history that costs real money to clean up at twenty-five.
What happens when we eventually hire an HR person?
They inherit a running system instead of a shoebox — records complete, policies encoded, history intact. Their first month is improvement work, not archaeology, which is a far better use of the salary.
Your month, minus the spreadsheets.
Per employee, per month: attendance to upload-ready returns.
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