What is payroll?
Payroll is the end-to-end process of paying employees correctly. It starts with working out what each person earned in the period from their salary structure and attendance, then applies the deductions law and policy require. In India that means PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS applied at current rates on every payslip. The process then pays the net amounts through a bank file, issues payslips, and prepares the statutory return files: ECR for PF, contribution files for ESI, quarterly Form 24Q for TDS. Finally it keeps the registers and records that prove all of it, month after month. Run manually it is a spreadsheet marathon; run on software it is a computation with an approval step.
The monthly cycle, compressed
Inputs close (attendance, leave, approved overtime and incentives, joiner and exit events); the run computes every payslip with statutory lines and workings; someone reviews the preview's flagged variances and approves; then payday executes — bank file to the bank, payslips to self-service, return files to the consultant, registers to the archive. The same cycle at 10 employees and at 1,000; only the error tolerance changes.
What makes Indian payroll specifically hard
The statutory layer moves on several clocks at once: PF's wage ceiling and ECR deadline, ESI's contribution periods, professional tax per state, TDS as a year-long projection, minimum-wage floors per category, plus gratuity and leave encashment waiting at every exit. None of it is individually difficult; collectively it is why payroll is the first process growing companies move off spreadsheets.
What is the difference between payroll and salary?
Salary is the amount; payroll is the process that computes, pays, deducts, files and records it. 'Running payroll' means executing the whole monthly cycle, which is why the same salary can be cheap or expensive to administer depending on how the payroll behind it runs.
Go deeper: The payroll engine · Payslip format · Payroll vs Excel
The whole cycle, one approval.
PeopleDeck runs it on every payslip — per employee, per month.
Start free