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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
Most Indian organisations complete setup within two to three days. The part that determines whether that holds is not the software, it is how cleanly your existing data comes across.
Published as three because that is how many decisions there are. Everything below the surface is configuration, not development.
Import employees in seconds or sync your directory. Roles & departments auto-organise.
Enable attendance, payroll, performance & more, set to your policies, no code.
Reminders, approvals & reports run themselves. Your team gets time back.
Importing a list of names is trivial and almost useless. What makes the first live payroll correct is everything attached to those names: leave balances accrued to date, the salary structures that were in force, department hierarchies, and the statutory identifiers each employee already holds.
Structured Excel templates cover all four, so accrual continues from the position you are actually in rather than restarting from zero, which is the single most common complaint about badly executed HR migrations.
The first payroll you run on a new system should produce a number you can compare against one you already trust.
Why the dry run exists
Before the first live cutoff, a dry-run payroll is executed against your imported data, with your leave scheme, your shift patterns, your salary structures and your statutory configuration in place.
The output is then compared against the run you did last month in whatever you are moving away from. Where the two disagree, one of three things is true: the configuration is wrong, the imported data is wrong, or the old process was wrong. All three are worth knowing before real salaries move, and the third is more common than most companies expect.
An onboarding specialist works through this with you, policy validation first, then the dry run, then the reconciliation. It is the reason the two-to-three-day figure holds in practice rather than only in a proposal.
Leave schemes, shift patterns, grace periods, approval hierarchies and statutory applicability per location, confirmed against how you actually operate, not how a default assumes you do.
Your dry-run output set beside your last real run, line by line, so every difference is explained before anything is committed.
Run with the specialists available. Enterprise subscriptions have a dedicated customer success manager for exactly this moment.
Three steps is an accurate summary and a useless plan. This is the same sequence with the work in it, including the parts that are yours rather than ours.
Employee master data comes first, because every other module references it: names, statutory identifiers, dates of joining, departments, reporting lines and salary structures. It arrives as a spreadsheet you already have, mapped against an import template rather than retyped.
Validation happens on import rather than at the first payroll run. Records that fail, a malformed identifier, a missing date of joining, a salary structure that does not add up, are reported individually, because the failure mode to avoid is somebody being left out of the first run.
Two things reliably surface here, and neither is caused by the migration: duplicate records for people who were rehired or moved between entities, and salary structures that were described one way in an offer letter and calculated another way in practice. This is simply the first exercise that compares them.
This is the step that takes the thinking, and it is mostly yours. Leave types and accrual basis. Carry-forward and encashment caps. Shift patterns, grace windows and the point at which lateness becomes a half day. Notice periods by grade. Probation length. Approval routing and the thresholds that require a second approver.
Most companies discover during this step that one or two of their policies have never actually been decided, they have been improvised consistently enough to feel settled. Writing them down is the real work, and it is worth doing before the system applies them to four hundred people at once.
Configuration is a setting rather than a customisation, so a rule can be changed later. Policies carry effective dates, which means a change applies from the date it takes effect rather than rewriting the months already calculated under the old one.
Payroll is the module with a deadline attached, so it is the one worth sequencing carefully. Statutory registrations go in first, PF and ESI codes, professional tax registrations for each state you employ in, TAN for TDS, because the deductions are derived from them rather than entered.
If you are moving mid-financial-year, year-to-date figures come across as well. They are not optional: Form 16 has to reconcile across the whole year regardless of which system produced each month of it.
A start at the beginning of a financial year is simpler, but rarely available. Where it is not, the dry run below is what replaces it.
HR automation software is an unhelpfully broad phrase, so it is worth being specific about which work disappears. Three kinds do. Recurring calculation: accrual, statutory deduction, overtime, arrears. Routing: an application reaching the right approver and returning with an outcome attached. And prompting: a probation confirmation, an expiring document, an unapproved regularisation before the run closes.
Payroll automation software is the same idea applied to the month end, and its real contribution is not the arithmetic, which was never the slow part, but removing the reconciliation between systems that used to precede it.
What does not automate is judgement. Approving an exception, calibrating an appraisal, deciding whether a policy should change. Any system claiming otherwise is describing a workflow, not a decision.
Self-service is opened once the records are right, not before. An employee who logs in and finds their leave balance wrong forms a view of the system that is difficult to undo, and the balance is usually wrong because it was migrated mid-cycle rather than because anything is broken.
The rollout that works is narrow and specific: employees are told what they can now do themselves, payslips, balances, leave applications, address changes, investment declarations, and managers are told what is now routed to them. Both lists are short, which is the point.
Support runs on WhatsApp, phone and email with product specialists in Pune. Customer conversations cluster around monthly cutoffs and the annual tax cycle, which is when a slow answer is expensive, so that is what the phone line is for.
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Setup ends in days. The switch is only finished when the new system is the one people actually use. These are the points worth tracking, in the order they usually happen.
The whole team is in one record, not only a pilot group.
Real punches or real leave requests are being entered, not test data.
A live month processed end to end from the new system.
The point of no return: the old spreadsheet is no longer the fallback.
People check their own balances and payslips instead of asking HR.
Someone senior receives a number that came straight out of the system.
A practical rule: if the first live payroll has not run within about a month of setup, something is blocking the switch, find it rather than waiting.
Most Indian organisations complete setup within two to three days. Whether that holds depends less on the software than on how cleanly your existing data comes across.
Structured Excel templates cover employee master data, leave balances accrued to date, the salary structures in force, department hierarchies and the statutory identifiers each employee already holds.
No. Leave balances are imported as they stand, so accrual continues from the position you are actually in rather than restarting from zero.
Before the first live cutoff, a payroll is run against your imported data and configuration, then compared line by line with your last real run so every difference is explained before real salaries move.
Validation happens on import rather than at the first payroll run, and records that fail, such as a malformed identifier or a missing date of joining, are reported individually so nobody is left out of the first run.
Yes. Year-to-date figures come across as well, because Form 16 has to reconcile across the whole year regardless of which system produced each month of it.
Yes. Configuration is a setting rather than a customisation, and policies carry effective dates, so a change applies from the date it takes effect without rewriting months already calculated.
An onboarding specialist works through policy validation, the dry run and reconciliation with you, and support runs on WhatsApp, phone and email with product specialists in Pune. Enterprise subscriptions also have a dedicated customer success manager.
14-day free trial · Full access to all 12 modules · Zero implementation fee · Cancel anytime