Between 5 and 50 people, most tech companies are focused entirely on building the product and acquiring customers. HR documentation is the last thing anyone wants to spend time on. Offrd reduces it to minutes rather than hours.
Start with 50 free credits. No credit card required.
Tools your admin or accountant can run from day one.
Offer Letters
Create offer and joining letters for Software Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, and interns in minutes. Speed matters when you are competing with larger companies for the same candidates. See all formats.
Payroll
Generate payslips with PF, ESI, and TDS from month one. Consistent format from your first engineer to your fiftieth. Clean records when the due diligence request arrives.
Onboarding
Collect PAN, Aadhaar, bank details, and any background verification documents online. Most early-stage tech companies hire across cities from the beginning.
Probation and Confirmation
Probation periods and confirmation letters are the most commonly missed HR step at early-stage companies. Offrd tracks confirmation dates and generates the letters when they are due.
Increment Letters
Keep a clean record of every salary revision from the first appraisal cycle onward. These records matter for ESOP calculationsand for investor due diligence.
Pricing
Start with 50 free credits. Pay Rs.99 per document or Rs.50 per active employee per month. No long contracts. See pricing.
The first three or four hires get pristine offer letters. The founders are putting their own reputation on the line, they know these people personally, and they take the paperwork seriously. Templates reviewed by a lawyer friend pro bono. Signed and scanned. Saved in a folder. By employee eight or ten, the process has drifted. Someone sent an offer over WhatsApp to confirm the number, then followed up with a PDF two weeks later. That PDF was never signed because the employee was already working and it felt awkward to ask. By employee fifteen, there is no pattern at all.
The twenty person mark is where avoidance becomes a problem. PF registration is mandatory at twenty employees under the Act. Most early stage tech teams cross this line during a hiring sprint, when founders are focused on closing candidates rather than tracking headcount against statutory thresholds. The registration requirement kicks in from the date the threshold is crossed, not from the date the team remembers to register. Backlog contributions and late filing fees follow, along with awkward conversations with employees who have been asking about their PF statements.
The Code on Wages 2019, effective 21 November 2025, brought interns and contract staff into the mandatory appointment letter net. Most early stage teams are still running interns on verbal understandings, a stipend paid through payroll or reimbursement, and a vague end date. That arrangement was always legally thin. It is now explicitly non compliant. A one page fixed term appointment letter fixes the gap and takes under two minutes to generate, but it has to actually get done.
The due diligence scenario is the one most founders underestimate. Pre Series A diligence asks for eighteen months of employment records in a structured format. Founders who kept everything in Gmail threads spend two weeks pulling it together while the term sheet clock runs. The work is not hard. It is painful, and entirely avoidable. Founders who avoided it maintained records as a byproduct of onboarding rather than as a retrospective project.
A founder closes a seed round and the hiring plan accelerates. From twelve people to twenty five in four months is a typical shape. The founder is tracking runway, burn, pipeline, and shipping velocity. Nobody is tracking headcount against statutory thresholds because statutory thresholds were not on the list when the plan was drawn.
Somewhere in month three of the sprint, the team crosses twenty. Usually it happens on a Tuesday, quietly, when employee number twenty one signs the offer. Nothing changes that day. The product ships on schedule. Payroll runs normally. Two or three months later, a new hire asks HR, or the ops lead, or the founder directly, when their PF will start showing up on the portal. This is usually the first time anyone in the company realises the PF registration was supposed to have happened already.
The remediation is manageable but annoying. Register with EPFO from the effective date, which is the date the twentieth employee joined. Compute backlog contributions for all eligible employees from that date to the present. Pay them along with the applicable damages for delayed deposit. File the returns. The process takes four to six weeks and costs money that nobody budgeted for.
The second layer is the employee reaction. Anyone hired in the period between crossing twenty and completing registration spent months on a salary that should have had PF deductions but did not. Their net pay was technically higher than it should have been. Correcting this retroactively, whether by adjusting future payroll or asking them to cover their share of the missed months, is an uncomfortable conversation in every direction. The fastest way to avoid it is to watch the headcount chart and register the moment the twentieth offer letter goes out, before anyone joins.
The Shops and Establishments Act of your state covers every commercial establishment, including a two person tech startup working out of a rented flat. Registration with the state labour department is required. Hours, weekly off, leave entitlement, and wage payment timing are all set by the Act. Written appointment letters for every employee are a universal requirement across states, though the specific rules vary, so check the portal for the state your registered office is in.
The EPF and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 triggers at twenty employees. Contribution is 12% of basic from employer and employee. The employer share splits between PF at 3.67% and pension at 8.33%. The wage ceiling for mandatory coverage under Para 26A is ₹15,000 a month, so a senior engineer earning well above that is not automatically covered. Most tech startups opt in for all employees from day one of registration because it makes the calculation and the employee conversation simpler. EPFO is at epfindia.gov.in.
The Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 applies at ten employees earning up to ₹21,000 a month. At tech startup salary levels most engineers are above the ceiling, so ESI usually applies to support staff, office admin, and early career hires on stipend. 0.75% employee contribution, 3.25% employer contribution. ESIC is at esic.gov.in.
The Code on Wages 2019 came into force on 21 November 2025. Section 17(2) mandates written appointment letters for every worker. The Code also redefines basic wages at 50% of total remuneration, which affects how PF and gratuity are calculated going forward. Published at labour.gov.in.
DPIIT recognised startups get specific benefits under startupindia.gov.in, including self certification on select labour and environment laws for the first few years, and income tax exemption under Section 80-IAC for eligible companies. Recognition is worth applying for if your company meets the criteria.
Register your company, add your team, and create your first offer letter today. No credit card needed.
From the first hire. Offer letters, payslips, and onboarding records are easier to maintain from the start than to reconstruct later.
PF and ESI components are supported in payslip generation. Whether your establishment is required to register for PF and ESI depends on your headcount and state. Confirm with your CA.
Under Labour Codes 2025, written contracts are required for all workers including interns and contract staff. A brief appointment letter specifying the duration, role, and stipend satisfies this requirement.
Yes. Multiple users can be added to the same Offrd account with appropriate access levels.
Offer letters for all current employees, payslip records for the past 12 months, increment letters, and employment confirmation letters are standard requests.