Built for Bangalore SaaS, services and product companies across HSR Layout, Indiranagar, Koramangala, Whitefield, and Electronic City. TDS Section 192 across both regimes, Form 12BB declarations, Karnataka Professional Tax (20th deadline), PF and ESI on the 15th, bank-portal CSV for ICICI / HDFC / Axis. Free plan available.
Karnataka PT slab and deadline, mixed-regime startup payroll, Form 12BB declarations — built in.
₹200 per month for monthly salary above ₹15,000 (₹300 in February for the ₹2,500 annual cap). Karnataka PTRC-VII annual challan generated from the payroll register. Compliance Calendar surfaces the 20th-of-next-month deadline with status pills.
Engineering teams on the new tax regime; founders on the old. Form 12BB captures the regime per employee; TDS Section 192 applies the right slabs, 87A rebate, marginal relief at ₹7L, and surcharge tiers automatically.
Digital declaration of 80C, HRA, home loan interest, NPS, mediclaim, education loan, and 80G donations. Attestation workflow with audit trail. Admin reviews before declarations feed into TDS.
Create → Attendance (LOP grid + CSV import for biometric systems) → Compute → Review → Approve & Disburse. Period-locked via GSTR-3B proxy. Nothing posts to the ledger until approval.
Salary expense, PF / ESI / TDS / PT / LWF payables, net salary payable — posted to the same ledger that runs your accounting and GST. Trial balance reconciles against the payroll register on every close.
Bank account numbers AES-GCM encrypted at rest. PAN and Aadhaar masked in the UI. Bank-portal CSV download MFA-gated and HMAC-signed. Critical for fintech and payment-aggregator clients in HSR Layout and Koramangala.
Built for how Bangalore's product and SaaS teams actually pay people.
New regime for engineers, old regime for founders, switching per FY for everyone in between. Form 12BB captures the choice; TDS Section 192 applies the right slabs without manual override.
20th of next month for PT, 15th for PF and ESI, 7th for TDS. One widget on the payroll dashboard surfaces all four deadlines with status pills.
22-column CSV ready for ICICI Corporate, HDFC NetBanking Corporate, Axis CIB, and SBI Yono Business. MFA-gated download. Employees missing bank accounts surfaced before the upload.
Bangalore SaaS firms running zero-rated software exports under LUT get GST and payroll on one platform. The same period-lock protects both; the same audit trail covers both.
Bangalore is India's densest concentration of SaaS, IT services, and product-tech companies. Payroll for these businesses has a specific profile: small headcount in early-stage companies (10-50 employees), mixed regime distribution (engineers default to new regime, senior staff often on old for HRA + home loan optimisation), fast iteration on salary structure (raises, role changes between cycles), and a finance function that is usually one person juggling accounting, GST, payroll, and fundraising metrics.
ReadyBooks meets that profile. Form 12BB declarations are captured digitally on day one of the FY. TDS Section 192 handles both regimes side-by-side on the same run. The Compliance Calendar surfaces Karnataka PT (20th), PF and ESI (15th), and TDS (7th) in one place. The bank-portal CSV drops into ICICI Corporate without reformatting. And the whole thing lives on the same ledger as the GSTR-1 LUT export flow that most Bangalore SaaS firms run every month.
Bangalore's payroll mix splits across roughly four employer archetypes. SaaS and consumer-internet startups (HSR Layout, Indiranagar, Koramangala) typically run small headcount (10-100) with high salary bands, mixed regime distribution, and a CFO who came from a previous startup. IT services firms (Electronic City, Whitefield, Sarjapur Road) run larger headcount (100-1,000+) with band-level salary templates, predictable component structures, and dedicated payroll ops. Product engineering offices of global firms (ORR, Bellandur) run a smaller but high-compensation slice with significant variable components. Bangalore CA firms (Jayanagar, JP Nagar, Indiranagar) manage small payroll for client tenants — typically 5-50 clients each.
ReadyBooks covers each archetype on the same product. The same salary-structure library, the same run wizard, the same TDS engine, the same Compliance Calendar — what differs is how features are used. A 12-person SaaS startup runs payroll in 30 minutes once a month. A 400-person IT services firm runs the same wizard with 400 employees in parallel. A CA firm rotates between client tenants from one multi-client dashboard.
The Karnataka Tax on Professions, Trades, Callings and Employments Act 1976 levies a monthly PT on every employee earning above ₹15,000 per month. The rate is flat ₹200 per month for employees earning more than ₹15,000, with ₹300 in February to make the annual cap ₹2,500. The Karnataka Commercial Taxes Department issues the PTRC (Professional Tax Registration Certificate) to the employer and PTEC (Enrolment Certificate) where required.
The monthly PT challan is due on the 20th of the next month — April PT by 20 May, May PT by 20 June, and so on. Late deposit attracts interest at 1.25% per month plus a penalty of up to ₹1,000 per challan. The annual PT return PTRC-VII is due by 30 April of the next financial year. ReadyBooks surfaces the 20th-of-next-month deadline on the Compliance Calendar widget with status pills, and the PTRC-VII annual return is generated from the payroll register at year-end.
Bangalore employers operating across multiple Karnataka districts (Bangalore Urban, Bangalore Rural, Mysore) typically register a single PTRC at the head office and report all employees under it. ReadyBooks supports a single Karnataka PT registration per tenant; the same registration covers employees across districts.
A typical 25-person Bangalore SaaS company has a mix of regime preferences. Engineers and product designers tend to pick the new regime — slabs are lower, the standard deduction is ₹75,000, and HRA / 80C optimisation is not material because they are renting modest places and have not yet built up significant Section 80C investments. Senior staff and founders tend to pick the old regime — HRA optimisation (Bangalore rents at the senior level are substantial), home loan interest under Section 24, NPS additional under 80CCD(1B), 80C maxed out via PPF + ELSS + life insurance + home loan principal.
ReadyBooks runs both regimes inside the same payroll cycle. Each employee picks their regime in Form 12BB at the start of the FY. The TDS engine applies the right slabs per employee per pay period — new regime slabs (0/5/10/15/20/30% across the FY 2025-26 brackets) for the engineers, old regime slabs (0/5/20/30%) plus HRA exemption, Section 80C, Section 24, 80CCD(1B), 80D for the founders. Section 87A rebate, marginal relief at ₹7L, surcharge tiers (10/15/25/37%), and the 4% health-and-education cess are applied per the employee's regime.
Form 16 generation (when shipped — Plan 3 of the TDS compliance roadmap) will reflect the employee's regime selection. Until then, the platform captures every input Form 16 needs — gross salary, regime, declared investments, TDS computed and deposited — so a templated PDF is a near-term build, not a research project.
A typical Bangalore SaaS company migrating to ReadyBooks brings 6-24 months of payroll history from Greytip, Keka, Zoho Payroll, or a custom Excel template the founding accountant set up three years ago. The recommended migration approach: import the last 2-3 pay cycles (CSV upload via the bulk import flow) for trial balance continuity and run the next cycle fresh inside ReadyBooks.
Employee master data (PAN, Aadhaar, bank account, joining date, basic + HRA + other structure components) comes over via CSV. Form 12BB declarations need to be re-attested digitally inside ReadyBooks — the audit trail starts from re-attestation, which is cleaner than importing stale declarations from the prior system.
The harder part of any migration is the bank-portal CSV format change. Most prior tools generate a slightly different column layout for HDFC / ICICI / Axis. ReadyBooks ships the standard 22-column format that drops directly into all four major corporate banking portals — a one-time format change at the bank end (typically a 10-minute reconfiguration via the bank ops team) and the disbursement flow runs smoothly thereafter.
Form 12BB captured digitally; TDS Section 192 applies the right regime per employee. Karnataka PT, PF, ESI, and TDS deadlines surfaced on the Compliance Calendar. ICICI Corporate CSV download closes the run.
LOP grid in the run wizard captures attendance per employee per day; CSV import from the biometric system handles warehouse staff. Salary prorates automatically. Bank-portal CSV ready for HDFC NetBanking by the 28th every month.
Multi-client dashboard surfaces compliance status across all six clients. PF and TDS challans recorded inside each tenant; KPI strip shows which periods are pending. Articled clerks prepare runs; partner approves before posting.