HR and payroll software for a 10–200 person company: what you actually need

Most HR software is sold as if every company had 2,000 people and an HR department. A company of 10 to 200 has different problems. One person — often the founder, an office manager or the accountant — runs HR alongside a day job, payroll is a monthly scramble through a spreadsheet, and nobody can say with confidence how many days of leave anyone has left.

This guide sets out what you actually need at each size, what you can safely skip, and how to compare options without being sold modules you will never open. We build CoreStack People, an HR and payroll system, so we will say where it fits — and where it does not.

Stage by stage

10–30 people: stop losing information

At this size the problem is not process, it is memory. Leave is approved on WhatsApp, attendance sits in a biometric device nobody exports, and the salary sheet has formulas only one person understands. You need:

• One record per employee: joining date, salary, documents, bank details.
• Leave applied for and approved in one place, with balances everyone can see.
• Attendance from a phone or the existing device, not a register.
• Payslips generated from the same data, not retyped.

What you can skip: performance modules, multi-level approval chains and analytics. You will not use them yet.

30–80 people: managers need to manage

Now there are team leads who approve leave and overtime, and the founder can no longer see everything. The new needs are about delegation:

• Roles and permissions — a manager sees and approves their own team, not everyone's salary.
• One approvals inbox, so leave, overtime and expense claims do not wait in five different places.
• Shifts and rosters, if anyone works outside nine to six.
• Self-service: employees download payslips, check balances and update their details without asking HR.
• Expense claims with receipts attached.

80–200 people: consistency and records

At this size the risks are disputes and audits. Someone challenges a deduction, an inspector asks for registers, a manager leaves and their team's history leaves with them. You need:

• Payroll that follows your real salary structure and statutory deductions — in India, typically PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS.
• Documents verified and stored against each employee, and HR letters generated from templates.
• Policies published with acknowledgement, so you can show who read what.
• Performance reviews on a cycle, with goals and, if you want it, 360° feedback.
• An exit process: resignation, clearance and final settlement.
• A record of who changed what, and when.

The five things that decide whether it gets used

Feature lists all look the same. These are what separate software people use from software people avoid:

1. It works on the phone your lowest-paid employee owns. If checking in or applying for leave needs a laptop, half your staff will keep asking HR instead.
2. Applying for leave takes two taps. Every extra screen sends a request back to WhatsApp.
3. It follows your salary structure. If you have to redesign pay to fit the software, the software is wrong for you.
4. Your data comes out. You can export everything — employees, attendance, payroll history — in a usable format, whenever you want.
5. Someone answers. When payroll is due and a number looks wrong, a person who knows the system has to reply that day.

What it costs

HR software is almost always priced per employee per month, and the headline price is rarely the price you pay. Compare three years of total cost, and ask every vendor:

A worked example, with illustrative numbers rather than anyone's price list: a 60-person company paying ₹150 per employee a month pays ₹1,08,000 a year; at $5 per employee, $3,600. Over three years that is ₹3,24,000 or $10,800 before setup or add-on modules. That is a fair price for software that saves an office manager two days every month — and an expensive one for software nobody opens.

Off the shelf, configured, or built?

We go deeper into the trade-off in custom software vs SaaS: when it makes sense to build.

Where CoreStack People fits

CoreStack People is our own HR and payroll system, live at people.corestacktechnology.com. It covers attendance and check-in; shifts, overtime and holiday calendars; leave; payroll with salary structures, monthly runs, payslips and the statutory deductions a company configures for itself; expense claims; tax declarations; performance reviews with goals and anonymous 360° feedback; verified documents, HR letters, policies with acknowledgement, and a resignation-to-clearance exit flow.

Employees use it on their phone, in English or Hindi, with large text if they need it. Managers approve leave, overtime and expenses from one inbox. Each company sets its own currency, timezone and number formats, and defines its own roles and permissions, so it works outside India as well as in it. It can be set up for your company, under your name, in days.

If your people work across many sites — security, facility management, construction, staffing — the Workforce Suite pairs it with SitePulse for geofenced attendance, from ₹60 per worker a month for both.

Where it may not fit: if you need it connected to a particular accounting or ERP system, ask first. We will tell you plainly whether that is configuration, a small build, or a reason to choose something else.

A one-page shortlist checklist

• Can an employee check in and apply for leave on a basic Android phone?
• Can it hold our salary structure without changing it?
• Does it handle the statutory deductions we actually have?
• Can managers approve everything from one place?
• Can we export all our data at any time?
• What is the three-year cost at the headcount we expect?
• Who answers on payroll day?
• Can we run one month in parallel with our current sheet before switching?

The last question matters most. Run one payroll in both systems and compare every line; the differences find the rules nobody wrote down. We describe the method in turning a paper register into software, and there is a shorter India-specific checklist in HRMS software for small companies.

See it with your own setup

Ask for a demo of CoreStack People on WhatsApp or at krishan.joshi@corestacktechnology.com. Tell us your headcount and how you run payroll today, and we will show you your own setup. If your HR flow is unusual, we will send a free design of how it would look as software within 48 hours.

Frequently asked questions