How to Choose Payroll Software in Nepal: 9 Checks

The right payroll software for a Nepali company is one that handles Bikram Sambat months, keeps statutory rules editable instead of hard-coded, produces a clear payslip and records who changed what. Everything else is secondary. Many buyers compare screens and price first and discover these basics only after the first live month.

1. Does it follow the Nepali calendar?

Your staff are paid for Baisakh, Jestha and Asar, not for a Gregorian month. A BS month has between 29 and 32 days, so any day-based calculation must know exactly how many days the month has. Ask the vendor to show a part-month joiner in a 32-day month and explain the result. If the answer is "we use 30 days for everything", check that this matches your policy and that you can change it.

2. Are statutory rules editable?

Tax on salary, social security, provident fund and CIT are revised from time to time through the Finance Act and labour regulations. Software that has the numbers fixed in code will be wrong the day a rule changes and you will wait for a developer. Look for rates, limits and effective dates held as settings. Better still, the system should keep the old rule for old months, so re-opening Poush from last year still shows what was actually paid.

No vendor should promise that they know every current rate by heart. The honest approach is that you or your accountant confirm the current figures with the Inland Revenue Department, the Social Security Fund or your labour office, and the software applies them.

3. What does the payslip look like?

Staff trust a payslip that shows every earning and deduction line by line, with the month, fiscal year and their employee number. Ask for a sample in your letterhead. Check that it can be exported as PDF, because most HR teams today send payslips through WhatsApp or email rather than printing them.

4. How are advances and loans handled?

A very common Nepali practice is an advance against salary for medical costs, a festival or a family event. Good payroll software records the advance, the instalment plan and the balance, then recovers the right amount each month and stops when the balance reaches zero. Without this, advances live in a notebook and arguments follow.

5. Can you see an audit trail?

Salary is the most sensitive data in the company. Ask whether the system logs who changed a basic salary, who approved a month and when it was locked. After a month is locked, edits should need a deliberate unlock by an authorised user.

6. A quick comparison table

Check	Good answer	Warning sign
Calendar	BS months and Shrawan fiscal year	Only English months
Rules	Editable with effective dates	Changes need the vendor
Payslip	PDF with your letterhead	Fixed generic layout
Access	Role-based salary screens	Single shared login
History	Locked months and change log	Anyone can overwrite old months
Support	WhatsApp or phone in Nepali	Email only, slow reply

7. Questions to ask before you pay

• Can I import my existing employee list from Excel?
• Can I run last month in parallel and compare totals?
• How do I get a bank transfer list for my bank?
• Who owns the data, and how do I export everything if I leave?
• Where are backups stored and how often?
• What happens during load-shedding or a long internet outage?

8. Mistakes buyers make

The first is buying on price alone and then paying for every small change. The second is choosing a foreign HR tool that has no concept of Nepali taxation, so the finance team still does the real calculation in Excel. The third is skipping the parallel run. Always run one real month in both systems and compare every employee, not just the total.

Also think about who will operate it. If one clerk will run payroll, the screens must be simple. If a chartered accountant will review it, the summaries must be exportable.

Think about the people side

Payroll is also a trust exercise. Staff notice quickly when a system makes mistakes with their money, so involve HR early and explain what will change for them: a clearer payslip, a fixed date for salary and a proper way to raise a query. Ask the vendor how a disputed payslip is corrected. A good system lets you reopen one employee for a supplementary payment next month without disturbing the locked sheet, and records why.

It also pays to think about hosting. An office with unreliable internet or frequent load-shedding may prefer a local installation with an inverter or UPS and nightly backups, while a company with several branches may prefer an online system. Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you are buying and where the data lives.

Scoring vendors fairly

Give each vendor the same sample: ten employees, one joiner, one leaver, one advance, one overtime case and one allowance change. Ask them to produce the sheet and the payslips from it. Score the results on correctness, clarity and how many manual steps were needed. A demo with your own data tells you far more than a slide deck, and it quickly separates real payroll systems from generic accounting screens with a salary tab.

Next step

Send us your current salary sheet and a blank payslip you like. We will configure a sample so you can judge the result against your own numbers. See what is included on the payroll software page, or read how attendance feeds salary in our attendance software overview. Prices come from the demo and quote, never from a guess.

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