Short answer: for a 100-employee company in India, a full HRMS is usually the right buy. Once you need leave, attendance and self-service alongside payroll, running them as separate tools creates monthly reconciliation work that an integrated HRMS removes. Expect payroll-only to cost around ₹48,000 to ₹1.08 lakh a year and a full HRMS about ₹1.08 lakh to ₹2.64 lakh, an extra ₹1.08 lakh or so. Stay on payroll-only only if you genuinely need nothing beyond salaries computed and filed, in a single state.
This is the exact question a 100-person IT services company in Pune put to me. One HR manager, one payroll executive, people spread between a Pune head office and a small Hyderabad team, and a payroll tool that was fine at 40 people now buckling under leave and attendance reconciliation every month-end. The founder wanted to know if upgrading to a full HRMS was worth roughly a lakh a year. For them, yes.
One hundred is the headcount where the answer genuinely flips for most companies, which is why this query gets asked so often. Set your real modules and states below and see where you land.
greytHR runs payroll, payslips and full HR (attendance, leave, onboarding) plus PF, ESI, PT and TDS compliance for Indian teams, from small companies to 1,000+ employees.
Why 100 is the tipping point
At 40 employees one person can eyeball attendance, approve leave over chat, and hand a clean sheet to payroll. At 100 that breaks. A single HR person administering 100 people cannot manually reconcile biometric attendance, leave balances, and payroll inputs every cycle without errors creeping in. The errors are the tell. Wrong leave-without-pay deductions, missed attendance regularisations, payslip disputes that eat a day each.
A full HRMS closes the loop. Attendance feeds leave, leave feeds payroll, and the employee sees all of it in one self-service app. The reconciliation work that a payroll-only setup dumps back on your HR team simply disappears. That saved time is the real return, not any single feature.
What payroll-only leaves on the table at 100
Payroll-only software still runs payroll perfectly well at 100 people. The gap is everything that surrounds payroll. Leave management in a payroll tool is usually a flat ledger, not a policy engine with accruals, carry-forward caps and approval chains. Attendance is often an import, not a live integration. Onboarding, performance and recruitment are absent.
At 100 employees those absences translate into hours. Your HR manager becomes the integration layer between three tools, copying data between an attendance app, a leave sheet and the payroll system. That human glue is the hidden cost of staying payroll-only past this size.
When payroll-only still wins at 100
Do not upgrade on headcount alone. A 100-person company that runs a single-state payroll, outsources recruitment, handles performance in a way it is happy with, and only needs salaries computed and filed can stay on payroll-only and pocket the difference. The recommender above shows this: strip the modules back to payroll only, keep one state and stable hiring, and the verdict returns to payroll-only.
The decision is need times complexity, not a headcount threshold. Some 100-person firms are simpler than some 60-person ones.
The cost math
Payroll-only at 100 employees runs about ₹48,000 to ₹1.08 lakh a year. A full HRMS lands around ₹1.08 lakh to ₹2.64 lakh. The extra is roughly ₹1.08 lakh a year at the midpoints, which works out to a bit under ₹100 per employee per month for the added modules.
Weigh that against a fraction of one HR salary. If the suite saves your HR manager three days a month of reconciliation, it pays for itself and then some. Before you sign either contract, make sure the inputs are right: structure offers in the gross to CTC calculator and pressure-test take-home across regimes in the in-hand salary optimizer. If you are smaller, the 50-employee guide leans the other way; scaling past this, see the 200-employee guide.