Run attendance, leaves, and payroll from the same login

“HR CRM” means two different things. Here is which one this is

People type HR CRM for two products that have almost nothing in common.

One is an HRMS: attendance, leave, payroll, PF, ESIC, TDS, Form 16, employee records. Software for the people who already work for you. That is what this add-on is.

The other is a recruitment pipeline: candidates moving through stages the way deals move through a sales pipeline. ViveLead does not ship a dedicated recruitment module, so if that is what you came for, this is not it and we would rather say so now than after you have signed up.

There is a third reading, and it is the one most Indian SMBs actually mean: a sales CRM and an HR system on the same login, on one bill. That is exactly what this is. CRM from Rs 499 per user per month (Rs 399 billed yearly), the HR layer for Rs 99 more on any plan. One vendor, one invoice, one set of employee records that both halves read.

Most tools make you buy those separately. Zoho sells CRM and People as different products on different subscriptions. greytHR, Keka, Qandle and factoHR sell HR systems, not sales CRMs. The bundle is the point.

If you are still comparing vendors rather than reading about this one, the shortlist with the bundle pricing math for each is on best CRM with HRMS in India.

What the Payroll Actually Runs

Plenty of tools call a salary calculator “payroll”. The test is whether it produces the artefacts a compliant Indian payroll has to produce. This one does:

• Salary structures per employee, with version history, so a mid-year revision does not overwrite what you already paid.
• A payroll run as a three-step process: preview, approve, then lock. A locked run cannot be quietly edited after payslips go out.
• Payslips as PDFs, generated in bulk, emailed to the team, and visible to each employee in their own login.
• PF, ESIC, professional tax and TDS, with tax slabs, employee tax declarations and a TDS calculator behind them.
• Form 16 generation and distribution at year end.
• TDS challan handling, including reading the CSI file back to reconcile what was actually deposited.
• Bank advice files for salary disbursement, so the bank gets one file rather than a typed list.
• Full and final settlement when someone leaves.

Attendance covers check-in and check-out, paid and unpaid breaks, shift start with late detection, and optional location capture (latitude, longitude and address) against a named office. It runs in your company’s timezone, not a fixed one. Here is how to set up shifts and attendance. Leaves cover leave types you define, applications with attachments, approvals, and per-employee balances.

What Indian HRMS Actually Costs

Here is the part that decides whether this add-on is right for you, and it has nothing to do with features.

Most Indian HRMS vendors do not price per employee. They charge a base fee that includes 50 employees. A ten-person team pays for fifty. Qandle says it outright in its own FAQ: the minimum billing amount is for 50 users.

Read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 7 September 2026, before GST:

Keka is the biggest name on that list and its pricing page carries no price at all, only a feature grid and a phone number. Third-party listings report roughly Rs 6,999 a month flat to 100 employees plus a one-time implementation fee in the tens of thousands, but we could not verify either figure against Keka, so treat both as hearsay.

The ViveLead HRMS add-on is Rs 99 per user per month, Rs 79 billed yearly, with no base fee and no minimum. Ten people cost Rs 990 a month, or Rs 790 yearly. Fifty people cost Rs 4,950. There is no step where you pay for headcount you do not have.

Where This Add-On Wins, and Where It Loses

It wins on small teams because there is no floor. It loses on larger ones for exactly the same reason: a flat fee that covers 50 employees gets cheaper per head the more people you put under it, and a per-user fee never does.

The crossover, at the Rs 99 monthly rate:

On the yearly Rs 79 rate those numbers move out to 13 and 32 respectively.

Three more things worth saying plainly:

• Kredily is free for unlimited employees and runs payroll, attendance and leave. If price is the only question, that is the answer, and no paid tool beats it.
• This is an add-on, not a product. It attaches to a ViveLead CRM plan starting at Rs 499 per user, which is the CRM with payroll setup: Rs 598 per user for both halves on one login. If you want HR software and no CRM, buy an HRMS. The CRM with HRMS guide covers that choice, and what a CRM actually costs in India covers the CRM half.
• There is no selfie or biometric attendance here. Check-in can carry a location, but face capture and fingerprint devices are not built. greytHR sells GPS live tracking as a Rs 140 per user add-on and Kredily sells an AI attendance add-on at Rs 50 per user. If proving physical presence is the reason you are buying, buy one of those.

What you get instead is that attendance, leave, salary and the sales pipeline sit in one account, so the person who closed the deal and the payslip that pays them for it are the same record. That is worth something or it is worth nothing, depending entirely on whether you were going to buy a CRM anyway.