Know what HR costs, and what you owe, from 5 to 50.

Not on day one. A spreadsheet is fine while a handful of people work one location, approvals are informal, and nobody needs an audit trail. You have outgrown it when no one can explain how a leave balance was reached, a correction overwrites the original value and its approval, or requests and decisions live in chat instead of on the record. For most Indian startups that point arrives somewhere between ten and twenty-five people, which is also where ESI and gratuity become applicable.

LekhaHR publishes an exact per-active-employee rate, so cost scales with headcount and nothing else. On the Operations plan at annual rates, 10 employees works out to ₹790 per month equivalent, 25 employees to ₹1,975, and 50 employees to ₹3,950. Business runs ₹1,190, ₹2,975 and ₹5,950 for the same sizes. There is no base platform fee and no minimum headcount, and every figure excludes GST.

LekhaHR does not offer a free-forever plan. It publishes a low per-active-employee rate you can check yourself, plus a 14-day Business trial so you can evaluate the product before committing. A free tool usually recovers the cost elsewhere; a published rate is the honest version of "cheapest".

They arrive as headcount crosses the thresholds set in law. Shops and Establishments registration applies from setup. ESI and gratuity become applicable at ten employees in most states, EPF at twenty, and Professional Tax is levied by some states from the first salaried employee. The dated thresholds are shown on the growth curve above. LekhaHR keeps the record those filings draw on; it does not file them for you and does not replace your CA or payroll consultant.

At an early stage a founder or ops lead can run employee records, attendance and leave in LekhaHR without a dedicated HR hire. That stops being true as the team and the policy load grow, when someone needs to own leave rules, exceptions and the statutory calendar. LekhaHR does not claim to replace that hire; it makes the record they inherit a clean one.

That depends on which problem is actually urgent, so this page will not self-rank or show customer logos it does not have. LekhaHR fits an Indian startup formalising employee records, attendance and leave at the ten-to-fifty stage, with transparent pricing and cited statutory thresholds. It is the wrong pick if you need released payroll, hiring or performance today, or field hardware. The stage guidance above answers this in both directions.

In rough order: a written offer and appointment terms, an attendance and working-hours policy, a leave policy inside your state's ranges, one place for employee records with consent, a prevention-of-sexual-harassment policy and committee, and statutory registrations as their thresholds approach. The section above lists each with what LekhaHR holds today and what stays your own document. Treat it as practical guidance, not legal advice, and confirm current thresholds with counsel.

When you need released payroll, hiring, HR helpdesk or performance review as a working module today; when you depend on kiosk or biometric-verification hardware, offline-first field punching, or continuous field GPS; or when you are still three or four people where a spreadsheet genuinely suffices. Those are honest gaps in the current scope, and a device-led or full-suite product will serve you better for now.

LekhaHR can capture location when an employee checks in or out and validate the configured office geofence. It does not track movement in the background, build travel routes or monitor employees between punches.