HR and payroll software that gets attendance right first

Who this is for

Payroll rarely goes wrong in the salary calculation. It goes wrong a month earlier, in attendance. A garment unit in Tiruppur with 180 workers across two shifts, a biometric reader at the gate, piece-rate tailors, daily-wage helpers and a labour contractor who sends his own muster roll will spend the first five days of every month reconciling four sources before anyone can be paid. A facility services company with guards and housekeeping staff posted at thirty client sites has the opposite problem: no gate at all, and a supervisor who marks everyone present. If either picture is familiar, this page is for you. An office with twenty salaried staff is better served by a subscription, and we say which kind further down.

What we build

• Attendance from every source: biometric device logs pulled automatically, GPS and selfie check-in from the staff app for site workers, and manual regularisation with an approval trail.
• Shifts and rosters: shift patterns, rotation, night allowances, grace time and half-day rules written once as a table rather than argued every month.
• Leave management: leave types, balances, applications and approvals on the app, with the attendance register updated automatically.
• Payroll run: monthly, piece-rate and daily-wage earnings, overtime, advances and loan recovery, deductions, and a bank transfer file ready for bulk upload.
• Statutory inputs: PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS fields maintained per employee, with the monthly figures and registers your consultant files from.
• Contractor labour: contractor-wise workers, attendance and the bill the contractor should be raising, so you check his invoice against your own data.
• Payslips and staff app: payslips delivered on WhatsApp or in the app, where staff also see attendance and apply for leave.
• Full and final: settlement calculation and documents when someone leaves.

How it fits an Indian workforce

Most of your workers will never open a laptop, so the employee-facing side lives on an Android phone and works in the language they read. Salary goes out as a bank file, cash advances are recorded against the next payslip, and a contractor's bill is checked against gate data rather than trusted. The statutory numbers are generated as inputs for your PF and ESI consultant or chartered accountant, not filed by the software, and we are careful to say that plainly because the rules change and the filing responsibility is yours. Our HRMS and payroll software glossary entries define the terms vendors tend to blur.

How the build runs

Discovery starts with three months of your old payroll sheets and the raw biometric export, because the exceptions in that data tell us more than any interview. The attendance rules table is designed and signed off before code is written. We then develop in weekly demos, connect your biometric devices early so the data pipeline is proven, and run one full month in parallel with your existing process before switching. Go-live is always the first of a month. VS Tech Builders handles the parallel-run comparison with you; it is the step that catches the rule nobody remembered to mention.

What it costs and why

Attendance plus payroll for a single location typically falls between ₹50,000 and ₹1,50,000. Add the staff app, contractor module and multi-site GPS attendance and the project becomes a complete system in the ₹1,50,000 to ₹5,00,000 range. The cost driver is the number of pay structures and attendance sources, not headcount, which is why a 400-worker unit with one shift pattern can cost less than a 90-person company with six. Terms are fixed-scope, with milestone payments of 40, 30 and 30 per cent and source code handed over at the end. Build time is 8 to 14 weeks including the parallel month.

When not to build custom

A company with under twenty-five salaried employees, standard working hours and no contractors should subscribe to a ready-made Indian payroll service and spend the difference elsewhere. Custom earns its cost when attendance comes from multiple sources, when wages are piece-rate or site-based, or when you want staff-facing features that no subscription will build for you. The guide to staff apps for field teams covers the mobile side in detail, and our pages on software for garment exporters and software for construction companies show how attendance and payroll sit inside a larger system for those two industries.