Payroll for an Indian school is not one calculation. It is four statutory calculations that happen to land on the same salary, each with its own threshold, its own due date and its own return.
Global payroll software treats these as an India setting. They are not a setting. They are the job.
Provident fund
PF applies to establishments over the employee count set by the Act, and the contribution is a percentage of basic salary plus dearness allowance rather than of gross pay. Which components count toward that base is exactly where schools get it wrong, because a school salary is usually built from many small allowances rather than one figure.
The employer contribution splits between the pension fund and the provident fund, and the split changes above a wage ceiling. The monthly return is filed against a challan. Miss the date and the interest is automatic.
Employee state insurance
ESI applies below a gross wage ceiling, which means a member of staff can move in and out of ESI during the year as their pay changes. Half the payroll can be in and half out, and the boundary moves.
A payroll that asks the office to maintain that list by hand will drift within two months.
Professional tax
Professional tax is a state subject. The slabs in Punjab are not the slabs in Maharashtra or Karnataka, so a school with branches in two states runs two different tables against the same payroll.
Some states have no professional tax at all. A product that hard-codes one state’s slabs is wrong everywhere else.
Tax deducted at source
TDS on salary is annual tax spread across twelve months. So it depends on the declarations each member of staff has made, on what they have submitted proof for, and on the regime they have chosen. It changes mid-year when somebody files a proof, and the remaining months have to absorb the difference.
At the end of the year it has to reconcile to Form 16, and Form 16 has to reconcile to what was actually deposited.
Why this belongs with attendance
None of the four can be calculated until you know who was present.
Leave without pay changes gross pay, which changes ESI eligibility, which changes the ESI contribution, which changes net pay, which changes the TDS spread across the remaining months. In most schools that chain is a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every month, from an attendance register kept somewhere else.
In EduBold, attendance and payroll read the same records, so the chain runs by itself. The punch that marked a teacher absent on the fourteenth is the same record that reduces her pay on the last working day. That is what makes the four calculations reliable rather than merely possible.