Short answer: for a 200-employee company in India, buy a full HRMS. At this size, especially once payroll runs across more than one state, manual reconciliation of attendance, leave and payroll is no longer safe to do by hand. Payroll-only runs about ₹96,000 to ₹2.16 lakh a year here; a full HRMS about ₹2.16 lakh to ₹5.28 lakh, an extra ₹2.16 lakh or so that pays back in reduced errors and reclaimed HR time. Payroll-only holds only if you have deliberately kept HR lean and outsourced everything but salary processing.
A 200-person BPO in Noida with a satellite team in Bengaluru is a textbook case. Two states means two professional-tax regimes, two sets of labour registrations, and shift-based attendance feeding a payroll that runs for hundreds of people twice a month. Their HR lead was still stitching attendance exports into the payroll tool by hand. At 200 employees across two states, that is not a workflow, it is a standing risk.
By 200 the recommender rarely lands on payroll-only, and the reasons stack up fast. Set your states and modules below to confirm.
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.
The compliance spread at 200 employees
Two hundred people is where multi-state usually enters the picture, and each state adds its own professional-tax slab, its own shops-and-establishment rules, and its own filing calendar. A payroll-only tool can compute state-specific PT, but the surrounding HR compliance, registers, statutory leave policies, state-wise holiday calendars, is where an integrated system earns its place.
Attendance is the other pressure point. Shift work, regularisations and overtime at 200 people cannot be reconciled into payroll by hand every cycle. An HRMS with native attendance closes that gap, and the closer the integration, the fewer disputes land on your HR team’s desk at month-end.
HR is a team, not a person
At 100 employees one HR manager can just about hold it together. At 200 you have an HR team, and the coordination between them becomes the problem a suite solves. Shared records, role-based access, approval chains that route to the right manager, and one source of truth for headcount all matter more than any single flashy module.
Payroll-only software has no concept of this. It processes salaries. Everything around the people, who reports to whom, who approved what leave, where an employee is in their notice period, lives outside it. At 200 that outside is too big to manage in spreadsheets.
When payroll-only could still hold
The honest exception: a 200-person company that has deliberately kept HR minimal, outsourced recruitment and performance entirely, runs a single-state payroll, and only wants salaries computed and filed. That company can run payroll-only and save the difference. It is rare, but the recommender will show it if you strip the inputs down. The tool follows your actual needs, not a headcount rule.
The cost math
Payroll-only at 200 employees runs roughly ₹96,000 to ₹2.16 lakh a year. A full HRMS lands around ₹2.16 lakh to ₹5.28 lakh. The gap is about ₹2.16 lakh a year at the midpoints. Per employee that premium starts shrinking, because most vendors discount as your seat count climbs.
Set against the cost of errors, the case is straightforward. One mis-filed PT return across two states, or a fortnight of a senior HR person’s time lost to reconciliation, costs more than the annual gap. Keep the salary structure tight with the gross to CTC calculator and model your appraisal budget with the CTC hike calculator. Smaller team? The 100-employee guide covers the tipping point; larger, see the 300-employee guide.