When it goes wrong,
it goes wrong on your desk.
Nobody thanks you for a payroll that ran. Everybody remembers the one that did not. The inspector's notice comes to you. So does the union's question about a contract worker's wage, and the tribunal's request for a muster roll from three years ago.
yfy is built so those moments are answered from a record rather than reconstructed from folders — across every state you operate in, for your own employees and the contract workforce you are held responsible for.
Five recurring problems, and how much of each is really a records problem
When pressure mounts from enforcement agencies, unions, or employees, documentary integrity is your entire defense.
| What lands on your desk | What it actually is | System defense |
|---|---|---|
| 1. An inspection or a notice | An evidence retrieval problem, under time pressure | View evidence vault → |
| 2. A dispute, domestic enquiry, or tribunal reference | A question about what your records show, and when they were created | Contemporaneous proof → |
| 3. A question about a contract worker you did not employ | A boundary problem — who directed, who paid, whose muster | Contract boundary → |
| 4. A payroll error, in public | A control problem that surfaces as a reputation problem | Payroll simulation → |
| 5. A statutory change nobody flagged | An applicability problem, discovered late | Inline ratchets → |
In a dispute, your records are your case
A conciliation meeting, a domestic enquiry, a section 33C(2) recovery application, a tribunal reference — every one of them turns on documents. Not on what happened, but on what you can show happened, and when the record was made.
Muster not written afterwards
Attendance captured at site, timestamped and geo-tagged as each mark is made. The evidentiary difference between a record made on the day and a register compiled for a hearing is everything.
Effective-dated job history
A promotion, transfer, or grade change is a new dated record, not an overwrite. "What was their grade in March 2024" has a reproducible answer that requires zero reconstruction.
Figures reproduce as filed
Every per-employee figure is fixed at computation time with stamped registration codes. Change a branch mapping today, and last year’s return still regenerates exactly as filed.
Audit trail nobody can edit
Document and filing events write to an append-only, hash-chained ledger. Obligation dismissals require a substantive written reason, are audited, and re-surface before hearings.
The two questions that decide a documentary dispute are "what does the record say" and "when was it made." Most HR systems answer the first and cannot answer the second, because they overwrite. This one is built not to.
The statutory shortfall is the smaller risk
Every IR manager who handles contract labour knows the bigger exposure is not a wage shortfall. It is a claim that the arrangement was not genuine contracting at all — that the workers were, in substance, yours.
To protect yourself under CLRA §21, EPF §8A and ESI §40, you have to check what your contractor paid. But the more you direct, supervise and control, the more you look like the employer.
The answer is not to check less. It is to keep the records unambiguous about who did what.
| Boundary Principle | How the Platform Keeps the Boundary Legible |
|---|---|
| Two separate records, two provenances | The contractor's reported wage and muster are the contractor's submission, held as such. Your gate and biometric record is yours, held separately. The verification compares them; it does not merge them into one record of your making. |
| The contractor remains the computing party | The design rule is written into every service: the principal employer didn't compute the wage — the contractor reports it, the principal employer checks it. The platform does not run your contractor's payroll and does not let you set their wage. |
| Deployment is proposed, then confirmed | The contractor proposes who is deployed; your site confirms. The record shows a contractor decision and a principal employer acceptance, not a principal employer instruction. |
| Vendor scoping is unconditional | A contractor in the portal reaches only their own roster and their own documents. It is not a setting an administrator could switch off. |
| Every override is named and reasoned | Payment above the verified figure requires an explicit human decision with a recorded justification — which is a governance record, not an instruction to a worker. |
Honest operational boundary: Whether an arrangement is genuine contracting is a legal question decided on the facts of your operation, and it is your counsel's call. What we can do is make sure the facts are recorded clearly, separately and contemporaneously, instead of being reconstructed years later from a shared spreadsheet. We will not tell you this eliminates a permanency claim, because no software can.
Simulation, separation, and a run that resumes instead of restarting
Controls that prevent gross-to-net surprises before salary hits employee bank accounts.
Full trial run that pays nobody
Simulation is a first-class run type — every employee computed, variance compared against the last cycle, nothing disbursed. Promotion to live is a flag flip, not a recomputation.
Four signatures on the money path
Compute, approve figures, approve payment, disburse — four verbs, four roles, plus a check that the person who approved payroll cannot approve its payment.
A run that resumes
Processing chunks at 500 employees with a commit per chunk. A failure resumes rather than restarts, and registers compute per segment so errors are isolated.
Right FY, automatically
The financial year derives from the pay period rather than a global current-year setting — so an arrears run for a prior year computes on that year’s slabs automatically.
Every per-employee figure is an immutable snapshot at computation time. A later change to a salary structure or a statutory rate cannot silently alter a payslip you already issued — which means a query three months later has one answer, not two.
Your obligations change the moment your data does
Add a location, cross a headcount threshold, register a new establishment, or take on a contract deployment — and your obligations change immediately.
Recompute on commit
Add a Tamil Nadu location and the labour welfare fund obligation appears before the page finishes reloading, with the screen telling you your edit raised it.
A ratchet, not a cliff
Applicability evaluates against the higher of live and declared headcount and holds once crossed. Seasonal ramp-down does not un-apply an obligation you legally still carry.
State amendments per state
A national threshold is suppressed only where every operating state has amended it. Partial coverage keeps the central rule and names the amended states.
Dismissals that expire
Compliance debt you cannot yet verify can be set aside only with a written reason, is audited, and re-surfaces automatically at the statutory deadline.
On the Labour Codes, stated honestly:
Thresholds differ between legacy acts and the four Codes, and states are framing rules at different speeds. The engine keeps the lower, stricter threshold binding and shows the Code figure alongside it, because flipping globally would understate your obligations in states still operating the old acts. You see both, and you are held to the stricter one.
Your team should be doing IR, not data entry
The reason your HR team has no time for employee relations is that it spends the month reconciling attendance, chasing challans and assembling documents for people who ask.
| Currently manual & reactive | What replaces it in yfy |
|---|---|
| Keying supervisor attendance sheets | Site muster over an SMS link — no app install, works offline, saves on every tap, cover recorded on the spot |
| Assembling a compliance pack when someone asks | Generated per contract, per month, from records the month already created |
| Answering the same payslip and leave-balance questions | Self-service with plain-language payslip and leave summaries, so the queue shortens |
| Rebuilding a document set for an audit | One governed vault, filed automatically by head, financial year, state and wage month at upload |
| Tracking licence and registration expiry in a spreadsheet | Expiry surfaced in a work queue before it lapses |
| Chasing a manager for a review or approval | Workflow with escalation, and an SLA clock that pauses when the ball is with the requester |
| Re-keying a new joiner from ATS into payroll | Requisition to employee record inside one tenant, with no re-entry of a PAN or bank account |
None of this is glamorous and all of it is the month. Removing it is the difference between an HR function that reacts and one that has time to get ahead of a dispute.
The obligations that are yours personally
Personal compliance exposures tracked directly inside the compliance register rather than loose email threads.
Grievance desk that cannot swallow requests
A request routing rules cannot place is refused at creation rather than lost in an unowned queue. An agent resolves and only the requester closes. The SLA clock runs in working time.
POSH as a tracked obligation
The internal committee, annual return and training requirement appear in the compliance register with due dates. Training completion satisfies the obligation and files the certificate into the vault.
Certification lapses that raise themselves
A lapsed statutory certification (POSH, factory safety, GMP) raises an obligation in the register, assigns the renewal, and files the certificate as evidence upon completion.
Built for people who clock in at a gate
Engineered for physical plants and 24/7 continuous operations.
Shift & roster
Continuous operations rosters with weekly-off and spread-over constraints visible rather than discovered at audit.
Biometric device ingestion
Turnstiles, face recognition and gate access records feeding the same unified muster as supervisor marks.
Geo-attendance & SMS muster
Instant verification for remote sites and yards where a native app install will never happen.
Multiple pay calendars
Plant runs 26th to 25th while head office runs 1st to 31st — handled as separate derived periods, not manual workarounds.
Honest architecture note: Native mobile applications are in progress. The site muster and employee self-service surfaces are mobile-first web today and work seamlessly in any browser without an install.
You are probably the champion, not the signatory
The budget for this usually sits with Finance or the plant head. So here is the version written for them — the same platform, argued in balance-sheet, ICFR controls, and audit evidence language.
Honest limits: What we do not do
We state our operational boundaries clearly so expectations align before you champion us internally.
- We do not give IR or legal advice. Whether an arrangement is genuine contracting, whether a domestic enquiry was properly conducted, whether a notice of change was required — all your counsel's calls. We keep the contemporaneous records.
- We do not manage union negotiations or settlements. A long-term settlement's commercial terms configure into pay structures once agreed. Getting to the agreement is your job.
- Recruitment is not a sourcing product. Requisition through to employee record inside one tenant, yes. Native posting to Naukri, LinkedIn and Indeed is not live.
- Learning is not a content library. Course assignment, completion tracking and certificate evidence, yes. The curriculum is yours or your partner's.
- Native mobile apps are in progress. Mobile-first browser surfaces today.
- We do not run your contractors' payroll. They do, and they should — that is what makes them the employer. We check what they report against what the statute required.
- India only. Deliberately. The depth in state minimum wage, professional tax, labour welfare fund and CLRA exists because we did not spread across jurisdictions.
- Three ISO certifications, few public references. We would rather replay three months of your own payroll than show you someone else's logo.
Operations, implementation and tribunal records
Replay a payroll you have already run
Send three months you have already paid. We re-compute them on our engine and report every figure where we disagree with your current system — per employee, per head, per state, with the statutory basis for our number. It writes nothing to anything live. There is no version of this that costs you a live payroll.
1. We agree across the board
You have a validated baseline and the trust conversation is over.
2. We disagree and we are right
You found a missing LWF deduction, a minimum wage shortfall, or a misfiled registration while it is still fixable.
3. We disagree and we are wrong
You found a bug in our engine for free, before anyone's pay depended on it.