Product companies hire engineers, designers, and product managers quickly and across locations. The documentation needs to keep up with the hiring pace without creating a parallel administrative workload.
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Offer Letters
Create offer and joining letters for Software Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, QA Engineers, and Customer Success Managers in minutes. Templates for full-time, intern, and contract hires. See all formats.
Payroll
Generate payslips with PF, ESI, and TDS. Add variable pay, performance bonus, and ESOPs-related allowance inputs cleanly. Consistent format from employee one to employee one hundred.
Increment Letters
Issue increment and confirmation letters consistently across your team during appraisal cycles. Records of revision history are available when due diligence asks for them.
Onboarding
Collect PAN, Aadhaar, and bank details online before day one. Especially useful for remote hires joining from outside your city.
Exit Letters
Generate relieving and experience letters quickly when engineers or product staff move on. Consistent format every time. See supported documents.
Pricing
Rs.99 per document or Rs.50 per active employee per month. Most product teams switch to the monthly plan once they cross 15 to 20 employees. See pricing.
Engineering teams love version control. Git history for every line of code, branch protection rules, pull request reviews. The HR side of the same company runs on Google Drive folders named “offer letters new”, “offer letters final”, and “offer letters final FINAL v2”. Signed copies sit in the founder’s email. Increment letters were sent to some employees and verbally communicated to others. Payslips come from whichever CA the finance team is using this quarter. It holds together because nobody is auditing it.
Then the term sheet arrives. Due diligence for a Series A or B includes a data room request that specifies employment records going back eighteen to twenty four months. Offer letters for every current employee and every recent exit. Increment history. Payslip samples. Proof of PF and ESI registration if applicable. Proof of statutory compliance if headcount is above the relevant thresholds. Some investors ask for CTC breakups reconciled against monthly payroll for a sample quarter. The company has maybe three weeks to produce all of it.
This is where the gap shows. Offer letters sent two years ago had different salary structure formats. Payslips from the earlier CA used different component names than the current one. Two engineers remember their increments happening verbally and never got letters. One intern converted to full time without a fresh appointment letter. Each of these is solvable on its own. Together they take person days and look worse to the legal diligence team than they should.
Contract engineers and fractional hires sit in their own ambiguous zone. A senior engineer engaged on a retainer for six months, invoicing monthly, working alongside full time staff, using the company laptop. The engagement was a consulting arrangement in form but an employment arrangement in substance. Labour officers and tax officers have different tests for this, and both tests can be applied retroactively. A clear fixed term appointment letter with scope and deliverables spelled out is cheaper than the argument either of those officers can start later.
The diligence checklist arrives as a shared folder. One tab is financial records, one is contracts and IP, one is employment. The employment tab is usually underestimated. Engineering founders assume it is a formality. They had a CA, they paid salaries on time, they gave offer letters. How hard can it be to upload the folder?
The first red flag is almost always the offer letters. Legal diligence runs through each one checking for consistency. Notice period clauses that shifted from thirty days to sixty days without explanation. IP assignment language that was strong in 2023 and weaker in 2024 because someone copied an older template. Non compete clauses that are unenforceable in India but were included anyway. None of these sink a deal. All of them create questions that the founder then has to answer in follow up emails instead of focusing on the term sheet.
The second is payslip history. Diligence wants to see twelve months of payslips for a sample set of employees. What they usually get is a mix of formats, because the finance function changed CAs or payroll tools halfway through the period. Components labelled differently across months make the reconciliation exercise painful. PF deductions that do not tie to the PF challans. ESI that was deducted from one employee but not another with identical salary. These are minor errors that take significant effort to explain.
The third, and the one that quietly costs the most, is gaps. Employees who left without exit letters. Increments that were paid but never formalised in writing. Interns who worked on production code without appointment letters clarifying IP ownership. These gaps do not appear in the original records at all. They have to be reconstructed from memory, from Slack archives, from bank statements. The cleanup is a distraction during the exact weeks when founder attention is most valuable elsewhere.
The Shops and Establishments Act of your state applies. Most software companies operate from a registered office in a metro or tier one city, so the state Act kicks in from day one. Registration, working hours, weekly off, leave entitlement, and written appointment letters for all employees are universal. Exact thresholds and allowances vary by state. Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu each have their own version.
The Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 governs PF. Registration becomes mandatory once headcount crosses twenty. Contribution is 12% of basic wages from employer and employee, with the employer share split between PF at 3.67% and pension at 8.33%. The wage ceiling under Para 26A is ₹15,000 a month, meaning employees whose basic wage crosses that line are not automatically in the scheme. For most engineering salaries this matters. The basic often sits above ₹15,000, so the contribution structure needs a conscious decision rather than a default. EPFO publishes updates at epfindia.gov.in.
The Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 covers employees earning up to ₹21,000 a month in gross wages, in establishments with ten or more workers. Contribution is 0.75% from the employee and 3.25% from the employer. Most software engineers sit above the ceiling, so ESI typically applies to support staff, interns on stipend, and early career hires. Details are at esic.gov.in.
The Code on Wages 2019 took effect on 21 November 2025. Section 17(2) requires a written appointment letter for every employee, interns and contract staff included. The Code also redefines basic wages at 50% of total remuneration, which affects how PF and gratuity are calculated going forward. Notifications are at labour.gov.in.
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Yes. Offrd supports permanent, fixed-term, internship, and contract appointment letter templates.
Add the bonus as a variable pay component in the payroll section. It appears as a labeled line item on the payslip.
Yes. There is no location restriction. All employees are managed under one Offrd account regardless of city.
Typically offer letters for all current and recent employees, increment letters, payslip records for the past 12 months, and employment confirmation letters. All of these are available in Offrd.
Yes. TDS components are supported in payslip generation. Your CA should advise on the correct TDS figure per employee based on their declared investments.