Free payroll software for small business in India can carry a real salary cycle for a small, simple team — what it cannot do is grow with you. Every no-cost plan in this market is bounded by headcount, by how many pay runs it allows, and by how much statutory output it will actually produce. This comparison sets out what the widely used free tiers include, where they stop, and the point at which paying starts costing less than working around them.
Two things decide the answer for any business: how many people sit on the payroll, and how much variation sits behind each salary. Fixed monthly salaries at one location is a different problem from rotating shifts, rider overtime and contract housekeeping spread across three shops.
Short answer: Free payroll software for small business in India covers one legal entity and a simple monthly salary cycle. It handles employee records, basic salary structures, payslips, and net pay calculation. It usually excludes filing-ready PF, ESI, and TDS outputs, multi-branch attendance, and contract labour. That suits a small, fixed-salary team at one location.
A free plan normally covers one legal entity and a small headcount — employee records, a basic salary structure, a monthly pay run, payslip generation and a net pay figure. What it usually leaves out is filing-ready PF, ESI and TDS output, multi-branch attendance, and contract labour.
Below, the questions worth asking are answered with what the tools actually do rather than what their homepages suggest.
Crossing the headcount cap in the middle of a financial year. Zoho Payroll publishes a free plan sized for teams of roughly five to ten people, with per-employee pricing above that. Kredily keeps the core payroll free and charges for add-on modules instead of headcount. Either way, the practical question is your upgrade trigger: decide it in the hiring month, not in the month you discover the cap.
PF, ESI and TDS-ready output. Most free tiers let you define deduction heads and subtract them from gross salary. Producing the monthly PF contribution file, the ESI return data or an annual tax statement for employees is where the paid tiers begin — greytHR and Keka put those reports behind paid plans, and Kredily offers them as paid add-ons. Without them, your accountant rebuilds the numbers from the salary register you export.
Exporting the salary register. Kredily and Zoho Payroll both allow a CSV or spreadsheet export of processed salary on their free tiers, which is what your chartered accountant needs at filing time. RazorpayX Payroll ties the run to its own banking rails, so the register is exportable but the workflow assumes salary is paid through RazorpayX. Check the export before you build a report around it.
Contract labour, branches and shifts. Free tiers are built for one entity at one location. Contractor invoices, night-shift differentials and a second branch are paid-plan territory, and the workaround is usually a spreadsheet bolted onto the side of the tool — which is where the audit trail starts leaking again.
Attendance capture. On free plans, attendance is typed in or imported from a CSV. Biometric or GPS punch capture is almost always an add-on. This matters more than any other line, because attendance is the input that decides whether the 1st is a review or a reconstruction.
Support on salary day. Free tiers give you email and documentation, not a phone line. That is the constraint you feel first when a pay run fails at 11 pm on the 31st.
Short answer: An Indian small business can test three free payroll routes: a banking-linked salary tool, an accounting platform's payroll module, and a standalone HR payroll app. Each runs a basic monthly cycle with payslips for a small team. Check current headcount caps on each vendor's pricing page before committing.
Kredily, Zoho Payroll and RazorpayX Payroll all publish a no-cost tier that a small Indian business can run a genuine salary cycle on, while greytHR and Keka sit mainly behind paid plans or time-limited trials. Free-tier caps move, so confirm the current numbers on each vendor's pricing page before you build a process on them.
Spreadsheets deserve a mention here too, because a well-built salary sheet with named deduction heads is still the most common payroll system in Indian small business. It is free, it exports to anything, and it breaks in exactly the same places a free tool breaks — at attendance, at multi-branch data collection, and at the moment the one person who understands the formulas leaves.
One caveat applies to all of them: free tiers are designed to win a logo, not to run a complicated payroll. Read the plan page for what is excluded, not just what is included.
Short answer: Compare free plans on four axes — employee and pay-run limits, compliance coverage, support responsiveness on salary day, and the hidden cost of the add-ons you will actually need. Vendors advertise the first freely and bury the other three in pricing fine print.
Do not compare homepages. Open each vendor's pricing page side by side, copy the answers into your own sheet, and date the row so you know when it was last checked. Free tiers get redrawn whenever a product moves upmarket, and a plan that met your need last quarter may not meet it now.
The comparison is only useful if it ends in a decision rule. Write yours down — for example, the plan is acceptable until a second branch opens, or until contract staff are engaged, or until the accountant asks for a PF contribution file — and review it at the start of every financial year.
Short answer: Hidden costs sit in setup and implementation, compliance add-on modules, attendance and biometric integrations, support upgrades, and exit or data-export charges. None appear in the headline price, and most surface in the month you actually need them.
Employee limits are the visible fence. The costs that surprise Indian small businesses are the ones attached to the gates on either side of it.
Short answer: Free is enough when the team is small, salaries are fixed monthly, and everyone works from one location. A single pay run, basic payslips, and a spreadsheet export for the accountant cover the need. No shift differentials, contractor invoices, or multi-branch attendance are involved.
Free is enough when one person runs payroll for a single location, everyone is on a fixed monthly salary, there is no overtime or shift differential, headcount sits comfortably inside the free cap, and your chartered accountant already files PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS from your salary register.
A four-person architectural practice in Coimbatore fits this exactly: two partners, a draughtsman and an office administrator, all on fixed monthly pay, no shifts, no overtime, one address. Zoho Payroll's free tier or a maintained spreadsheet both work, and the accountant's fee covers the filings.
A single-branch dental clinic in Pune fits too — a dentist, two assistants and a receptionist, salaries fixed by contract, leave tracked on a wall calendar that everyone can see. The moment this stops being enough is the moment a second chair is added and the assistants start working split shifts.
A six-person content agency in Indore is a third case. Everyone is on a monthly retainer, there are no statutory complications beyond the basics, and the founder processes salary in under an hour. Paying for software here buys nothing that the free tier does not already deliver.
Short answer: Free breaks when headcount grows past the plan's cap, or when salaries vary by overtime, shifts, or piece rates. It also fails when the business adds a second branch, contract staff, or needs filing-ready PF, ESI, and TDS output. Then paid payroll costs less than manual workarounds.
Free breaks the moment pay depends on something that happened during the month — a shift worked, a delivery completed, a branch attended — because that data has to enter the tool from somewhere, and on a free plan it enters by hand.
Take the pharmacy chain running three shops in Nagpur with around fifty-five people: counter staff on rotating shifts, two delivery riders per branch, a store manager each, and contract housekeeping billed through a third party. Riders earn overtime calculated from a note the branch manager wrote by hand. Night-shift counters sit on a different rate. Leave arrives as WhatsApp messages and phone calls, and gets transcribed into a diary. By the time the admin team finishes collecting paper muster sheets from all three branches, the reconciliation is happening from memory, not from records.
A free tier cannot absorb that. The headcount alone is past most free caps, and even where it is not, GPS punch capture, shift rosters that cross midnight, contractor invoices and branch-level reports all sit in paid plans. The failure is not arithmetic — the spreadsheet multiplies correctly. The failure is the audit trail, and it surfaces twice a month: on the 1st when someone disputes a missing shift, and in February when a resigned employee's full-and-final settlement is rebuilt from an old register.
A second pattern breaks free just as reliably: a twenty-person logistics firm paying drivers per trip rather than per month. Variable pay by trip, plus allowances, plus mid-month joins, means every pay run needs rules the free tier does not let you configure once and reuse.
Short answer: Judge salary management software by testing one real pay run with your messiest salary data. Check whether it exports a salary register your chartered accountant can use, handles your attendance source, and produces the statutory reports you file. Confirm support hours and upgrade triggers before committing.
Judge salary management software on the two days that matter — the day attendance is captured and the day salary is paid — and treat the rest of the demo as decoration. If a platform cannot trace a rupee of pay back to an approved attendance or leave record, the feature list will not save your month end.
Automation in payroll is narrower than the phrase suggests. It means the numbers arrive without being retyped, not that the software interprets the law. Setting up the structure, deciding which allowances count as wages, and reviewing exceptions each month remain your team's work.
Short answer: The first cycle follows a fixed order: freeze inputs, import attendance, clear exceptions, enter variable pay, run a preview, reconcile against last month, approve, generate payslips, export the register and bank file, then hand the statutory working to the accountant. Most first-cycle failures happen at the freeze step, not at the calculation step.
One person usually owns this — an accounts executive or an HR generalist wearing both hats. Here is the order that keeps a small Indian business out of trouble, and the specific places first cycles go wrong.
Two things go wrong on almost every first run. Payslips get released before approval, so an employee sees a number that then changes. And the person running payroll edits the source sheet while the tool has already been fed from it, which makes the register and the working file disagree. Both are process fixes, not software fixes, and both are worth writing into a one-page month-end checklist.
Short answer: A free tier does not hand you filing-ready PF, ESI, and TDS returns, nor professional tax calculations for multiple states. It rarely supports multi-branch attendance, contract labour compliance, or audit-ready reports. Your accountant must rebuild these from the exported salary register, which adds manual work and delay.
Compliance is where a cheap tool turns expensive. Payroll carries statutory obligations that do not pause for a product roadmap — provident fund through the EPFO, ESI through the ESIC, salary TDS through the Income Tax Department, and professional tax through each state government.
The EPFO publishes which employees are covered and how contributions are computed. The ESIC defines contribution periods and who falls within coverage. The Income Tax Department sets out which return applies to a salaried individual and which regime they may choose. Each state runs its own professional tax rules. Rates and ceilings move, and your payroll data has to satisfy all of it every month, not once a year.
No free tier decides any of this for you. Software cannot determine whether a particular allowance belongs inside the PF wage base, or whether a contractor's staff create a liability for you — those are conversations with your accountant. What a decent paid platform does is produce a clean, consistent wage base and a defensible trail, so the accountant's answer is applied once and applied to everyone, and a rule change is absorbed in one place rather than across three spreadsheets.
If your payroll is still being assembled from paper after a month on any tool, free or paid, the tool is not the problem — the attendance process is, and that is the thing worth fixing first.
Short answer: Provident fund and ESI are administered centrally, but professional tax and labour welfare fund are state subjects with their own registration, slabs and applicability. Most free tiers model one state, so a second state means either a paid plan or a manual deduction table running alongside the tool.
Anything with an office, site or field team outside its home state runs into this. Some states levy professional tax and some do not; labour welfare fund rules differ even among states that both levy it; and the deduction an employee owes depends on where they are registered for that tax, not where the head office sits.
What the HR or accounts person actually does, in order:
Where this breaks: the deduction table drifts out of date because a state revised its slabs and nobody updated the sheet; LWF is deducted for a state where the establishment is not registered, and refunding it later is painful; a remote employee hired in a new state is onboarded without anyone checking whether registration is needed there. None of these are calculation errors — the arithmetic is fine — they are coverage errors, and they surface either at filing or in an inspection, months after the pay cycle closed.
Short answer: Free payroll tools rarely ship native connectors to Tally, QuickBooks or Zoho Books. Integration usually means a mapped export — a salary register or journal voucher CSV — that your accountant imports or re-keys. Zoho Payroll posts to Zoho Books because both sit in one suite; Tally and QuickBooks normally need a mapping file.
Salary is the single largest recurring expense in most small businesses, so the payroll system and the books have to agree. The connection is less about clever software and more about agreeing on ledger heads before the first export.
What goes wrong most often: the employer's provident fund contribution gets booked as part of salary expense instead of a separate statutory liability, so nobody sees the true employer cost; the same journal is imported twice after an import error and quietly inflates salaries; and the TDS payable head in payroll differs from the one used in the accounting package, leaving two balances that never net to zero. Each of these is fixed by writing the mapping down once and treating it as the rule.
Short answer: Clean the employee master and lock the salary structure before importing, carry forward leave and loan balances as opening figures, import one closed month first, and run the new tool in parallel with the spreadsheet for at least one or two cycles before switching over.
Moving off a spreadsheet is a data exercise before it is a software exercise. The order below is the one that avoids mid-run rebuilds.
Common migration failures: a mid-month joiner whose salary gets prorated differently in the new tool than in the old sheet; arrears from the previous cycle that never make it into the opening figures; and one component — usually special allowance — that meant something different in the spreadsheet than in the tool's default structure. Reconcile these on the parallel run, because they will not announce themselves afterwards.
Short answer: Beyond salary calculation, Indian businesses expect self-service for payslips and tax declarations, leave integrated with attendance, reimbursement claims, and a usable set of reports. These are rarely in a free tier, and they are usually the reason a business upgrades.
None of these features change the calculation. What they change is how much of the month-end the payroll owner spends on collection and follow-up.
Treat this list as a wish list with a price attached, not a checklist for the free tier. Decide which two or three would genuinely save your team hours each month, and let those drive the upgrade decision rather than the total feature count.
Short answer: Sources include vendor pricing pages, product documentation, and free-tier feature comparisons published by the software providers themselves. Indian chartered accountant forums and payroll practitioner communities also offer practical checks. Always verify current plan details directly with the vendor, because features and limits change without notice.
Official references, checked on 15 September 2026. Statutory rates and thresholds change — confirm against the source before acting on them.
Frequently Asked QuestionsIs free payroll software enough for a 40-employee company?Usually not, once attendance, shifts or contract staff are involved. Free plans tend to cover basic salary calculation for a small team, while the parts that actually save you time — attendance captured at source, multi-branch handling, and PF, ESI and TDS-ready reports — typically sit in a paid plan. Test it on one real pay cycle before you decide.
Can I run payroll in Excel and use software only for filing?You can, and plenty of Indian businesses do it for years. The weak point is the audit trail: when attendance lives in paper registers and leave lives in WhatsApp, every dispute about a missing shift or an unrecorded half-day gets settled from memory. Software closes that gap by keeping attendance, leave and pay in one record.
What should I check before choosing salary management software?Check the two days that matter — the day attendance is captured and the day salary is paid. Make sure every rupee of pay traces back to an approved attendance or leave record, that statutory reports come out of the same pay run, and that your accountant can export the register without asking support.
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