Run salaries through a 5-step wizard. Calculate Section 192 TDS across both regimes. Capture Form 12BB declarations from employees. Export a bank-portal CSV in one click. Every run posts journal entries automatically. Free plan available.
Built on the same ledger that runs your accounting — payroll, statutory liabilities, and the journal entries to match. India-specific from the first slab onward.
New and old regime side-by-side. Slab math, Section 87A rebate, marginal relief at the ₹7,00,000 threshold, surcharge tiers (10/15/25/37%), and 4% health-and-education cess — all applied per employee, per month. FY 2025-26 and FY 2026-27 slabs pre-loaded.
Employees submit investment proofs through a guided form — 80C, HRA, home loan interest (Sec 24), NPS (80CCD(1B)), mediclaim (80D), education loan (80E), donations (80G). Attestation workflow with full audit trail; admins approve before the proofs feed into TDS computation.
Library of statutory components (PF 12% of basic, ESI 0.75% of gross, PT, LWF, TDS) plus custom earnings and deductions. Build per-employee salary structures with cross-field amount-XOR-percentage validation. Archive without breaking past runs — structures snapshot at run time.
Create run → Attendance (LOP days, CSV import) → Compute → Review → Approve & Disburse. Period-locked after approval via the GSTR-3B proxy. Every step is reviewable; nothing posts to the ledger until you approve.
A run-status banner that looks like an industrial control panel, a 5-step horizontal stepper, a gross-to-net cascade, anomaly chips (zero attendance, missing PAN, structure drift). Not the friendly toy dashboard — the one operations teams actually want.
Every payroll run posts: salary expense → ESI payable / PF payable / TDS payable / net salary payable. Statutory liabilities split correctly. Books always reconcile against payroll without a single manual entry.
22-column payroll register CSV ready for HDFC NetBanking, ICICI Corporate, SBI Yono, Axis CIB and most other bank portals. MFA-gated download, HMAC-signed proxy, audit row per export. Employees missing bank details are surfaced before you waste a download.
After the bulk transfer goes through, paste in the UTR and bank-paid-on date. Idempotent — re-confirming the same UTR is a no-op. FOR UPDATE NOWAIT prevents race conditions when two admins confirm at once. Stores who confirmed, when, and from which bank account.
Record monthly PF, ESI, PT, and TDS challan payments — challan number, bank account, paid date. KPI strip shows total challans this FY, total amount paid, pending periods, and the latest payment. Reconciles against the payable accounts automatically.
Dashboard widget for upcoming and overdue PF / ESI / PT / TDS deadlines. PF and ESI on the 15th, TDS on the 7th, PT on the 20th (Karnataka) or last day (Maharashtra). Status pills: upcoming, due soon (≤ 5 days), due today, overdue, done.
Karnataka (20th deadline) and Maharashtra (last day of the month) are supported out of the box. Other states default to the Karnataka rule with an in-app banner so you know to verify. Per-tenant state setting in Statutory Settings.
Four charts on the payroll dashboard: gross payroll trend (12 months), headcount trend, cost by department, and pay distribution histogram across 5 CTC buckets. Useful when the founder asks "is our salary spend out of line?"
Stop reconciling spreadsheets against bank portals at 1am the day before payday.
TDS Section 192 across both regimes, PF at 12% of basic with the ₹15,000 wage ceiling, ESI at 0.75% (employee) + 3.25% (employer) on gross up to the threshold, Professional Tax slabs per state. Every component computed correctly on every run.
Most payroll tools generate payslips and leave you to post the journal entries yourself. Every ReadyBooks run posts salary expense and statutory liabilities to the ledger automatically. Your trial balance reconciles against the payroll register on every close.
A 22-column CSV designed for the bank portals operations teams actually use. HDFC NetBanking, ICICI Corporate, SBI Yono, Axis CIB. No template-juggling, no row-by-row paste. UTR comes back into ReadyBooks once the transfer clears.
Every CRUD on every payroll record — runs, declarations, structures, components, challans, UTRs — is captured in payroll_audit_log with before / after JSON. Bank account numbers are AES-GCM encrypted at rest. Sensitive exports require MFA.
Most accounting platforms treat payroll as an afterthought — a separate module that emits a CSV you then key into your books. ReadyBooks reverses that: the same ledger that runs your accounting also runs your payroll. Every salary run posts Salary Expense to the P&L, splits the statutory liabilities into PF Payable / ESI Payable / TDS Payable / Net Salary Payable on the balance sheet, and clears those liabilities when you record the challan and bank transfer. The trial balance never drifts from the payroll register.
For Indian SMBs, this matters more than for businesses anywhere else. Section 192 TDS, EPF & MP Act 1952 contributions, the ESIC Act 1948 levies, state Professional Tax acts, the Form 16 / 24Q TDS return cycle, and the GST implications of any reimbursement component — these are not optional and they are not simple. Getting them right inside the same product that also files your GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B is materially easier than running payroll in one tool and accounting in another.
It also fits how Indian CA firms work. The CA who signs off your books wants payroll reconciled, statutory dues paid, challans recorded, and the audit trail visible — all in one place. ReadyBooks gives them a single login that covers your accounting, your GST, and your payroll. No more "send me the payroll Excel separately".