Pay Employees Right: Payslips, Payroll Records, and Form 16

What goes into a compliant Indian payroll run?

The statutory arithmetic is fixed, and Offrd carries it inside every calculation. EPF at 12% from the employee and 12% from the employer, on wages up to the ₹15,000 ceiling, with the EPS portion capped at ₹1,250 a month. ESI at 0.75% employee and 3.25% employer for wages up to ₹21,000. Professional tax by the slab of the employee's state. Gratuity accrued from Basic.

Get one of these wrong in Excel and the mistake compounds every month until an audit finds it. That reckoning is what a statutory engine exists to prevent.

Salary structures that balance themselves

Enter the total CTC and the structure auto balances across its heads. No circular formula where changing HRA breaks the special allowance cell. The same salary heads then feed the payslip, and later the settlement letter at exit, so the numbers agree across every document an employee ever receives. More on the mechanics at payroll processing.

Payslips in minutes, not a monthly ordeal

A payslip costs 2 credits, so the 50 free signup credits cover 25 payslips before you pay anything. Branded, itemized, statutory deductions shown, delivered without the copy last month and edit routine that produces payslips with the wrong month on them.

Form 16 for every employee, individual or bulk

Offrd generates Form 16 from the payroll records you already keep. Set up the company TAN and PAN once. Upload Part A from TRACES, generate Part B from each employee's locked tax declaration, combine the two, and send the document to the employee. Bulk generation covers the whole company in one pass instead of one PDF at a time in April.

Employee tax declarations, old regime and new

Each employee records their declaration in Offrd: New versus Old regime, HRA, LTA, and Chapter VI-A deductions. Save and Lock closes the declaration, and Part B is generated from the locked version, so the Form 16 matches what was actually declared rather than a stale draft.

What Offrd does not file

Plainly: Offrd computes, generates, and keeps records. It does not submit statutory returns. No 24Q to TRACES, no ECR to EPFO, no PT or ESIC submission. If automated filing is your primary pain, a payroll first product with filing rails is the honest referral. Offrd wins when documents, payroll records, and Form 16 are the need, at ₹99 a document or ₹50 per active employee a month.

Who this stage is built for

The buyer here is usually the finance or accounts person at a 5 to 75 employee company, or the founder wearing that hat. Their month has a rhythm: attendance closes, payroll runs, payslips go out, and any error surfaces as a WhatsApp message from an employee. Statutory mistakes are the ones that sting, because EPF and ESI errors attract penalties rather than just corrections. A payroll month that ends quietly is the entire value proposition.

Payroll across states is where spreadsheets break

Professional tax is the quiet troublemaker. Slabs differ by state, so a company with people in two or three states carries two or three different PT computations in the same payroll run. In a spreadsheet that means parallel formulas maintained by hand, and a new hire in a new state means research nobody budgeted for. On Offrd the state drives the slab, and a PIN code resolves city, district, and state on its own. The statutory compliance guide covers the ground rules.

Before pay: attendance. After pay: the daily grind

Payroll reads from attendance, which is the previous stage in daily terms, and both feed the ongoing management of the team. Attendance, leave, and the letters that fall due through the year have their own page: manage employees. If the record itself is not built yet, begin at onboard employees.