Short answer: for a 300-employee company in India, a full HRMS is the default, and buying it is straightforward. The volume of joiners, exits, approvals and compliance events is well past what payroll-only software plus spreadsheets can hold, and per-employee HRMS pricing starts dropping here as vendors discount for scale. Payroll-only runs about ₹1.08 lakh to ₹2.52 lakh a year; a full HRMS about ₹2.70 lakh to ₹6.48 lakh, an extra ₹2.79 lakh or so on a base where the per-head premium is now modest.
A 300-person retail chain running stores across three states brought me this decision during their budgeting cycle. Frontline attrition meant constant onboarding and exits, payroll ran for people who joined and left mid-month, and their finance team was reconciling headcount against payroll manually. At 300 employees with that churn, payroll-only software plus spreadsheets is not a system, it is a liability waiting for an audit.
At 300 the recommender lands firmly on HRMS for almost any real configuration. The interesting number is how the per-head premium shrinks. Check your setup below.
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.
Volume changes the problem
Three hundred employees generates a constant stream of transactions. Joiners, exits, transfers, leave requests, attendance regularisations, reimbursement claims. Each one is a data point that has to reach payroll correctly and on time. At this volume the failure mode is not one big mistake, it is a hundred small ones a month, each small enough to miss and large enough to annoy an employee.
A full HRMS turns that stream into a managed pipeline with approvals, timestamps and an audit trail. When finance asks why the June headcount does not match payroll, you have an answer in the system instead of a week of reconciliation. That audit trail is the quiet reason 300-person companies standardise on a suite.
Integration beats features at this size
By 300 you are not buying an HRMS for a shiny performance-review module. You are buying it because you need one system of record. Attendance, leave, payroll and employee master data living in one place, with role-based access and a clean export to your finance system, is worth more than any individual feature.
Payroll-only software cannot be that system of record. It knows salaries, not people. Bolting attendance and leave tools onto it recreates the integration problem you are trying to solve, and every integration seam is where data goes wrong.
The scale discount
Here is the part vendors do not lead with. Per-employee pricing falls as you grow. A suite that quotes a certain rate per head at 100 employees will quote less at 300, because their cost to serve barely moves while your seat count triples. So while the absolute HRMS bill is larger, the premium per employee over payroll-only is smaller than it was at 100. The recommender reflects this in the lower per-head figure it shows at 300.
The cost math
Payroll-only at 300 employees runs about ₹1.08 lakh to ₹2.52 lakh a year. A full HRMS lands around ₹2.70 lakh to ₹6.48 lakh. The gap is roughly ₹2.79 lakh a year at the midpoints, and on a 300-person base that is a modest per-head number for a system of record.
The bigger money at this scale is in getting compensation right, not the software line. A structuring error repeated across 300 salaries dwarfs the HRMS fee. Keep offers clean in the gross to CTC calculator, size increments with the CTC hike calculator, and confirm in-hand figures in the take-home calculator. See also the 200-employee and 400-employee guides.