Catalyst Chem HR & Payroll Case Study

The client

A specialty chemicals manufacturer with a technical culture.

Catalyst Chem India Private Limited manufactures specialty chemicals and engineers water treatment programmes from its base in New Delhi. Its work covers boiler water, cooling water, effluent and sewage treatment, and reverse osmosis, sold as a programme of chemistry, equipment and on-site technical service rather than as drums of product.

The company was recognised as the best upcoming water treatment company of 2018–2019 at the Water Digest Water Awards in New Delhi, an event held in partnership with UNESCO and India's Ministry of Water Resources. Its stated aim is to help customers save water and energy and reduce their total cost of operation.

That matters for an HR system. A business whose value is the knowledge and experience of its engineers has to track skills, site deployment and time on customer plants as carefully as it tracks salary.

Industry Water treatment & specialty chemicals
Headquarters New Delhi, India
Recognition Water Digest Water Awards, 2018–2019
Workforce Office, laboratory and field service staff

End markets the client serves

Biofuels
Food & beverage
Manufacturing
Pharmaceuticals
Power generation
Pulp & paper
Mining
Process industries

The brief

What had to change.

The brief was not "build an HR portal". It was to make the month-end salary run boring.

People data in several places

Personal details, contracts, documents and salary structures lived in separate workbooks, and none of them agreed with each other for long.

Attendance rekeyed by hand

Muster rolls and field visits were collected on paper, then typed into a sheet again before payroll could start. Every rekey was a chance to be wrong.

Statutory maths held by one person

Provident fund, ESI, professional tax and TDS were calculated in formulas only one person fully understood, which is a risk the business could not carry.

No trail to audit

When a number was queried there was no way to show who changed what, or which version of the sheet the payslip actually came from.

What we built

Two applications, one employee record.

HR and payroll are separate applications with separate users and permissions, sitting on one database. Nothing is entered twice, and payroll can never run against a version of an employee that HR has already superseded.

Human Resource application

The system of record for every person, from the day their application arrives to the day their final settlement clears.

Recruitment & onboarding

Vacancies, applicants, interview stages and offers, with the accepted candidate becoming an employee record rather than a fresh round of typing.

Employee master & documents

One profile per person: personal details, contract, grade, department, reporting line, bank account and the scanned documents that back each of them.

Attendance & shifts

Daily attendance, shift rosters, late and half-day rules and overtime, captured once and used directly by the salary run.

Leave management

Leave types with their own accrual and carry-forward rules, applications routed to the right approver, and balances that reconcile to the ledger.

Field visits & tour claims

Service engineers log visits to customer plants against a site, which feeds both the tour allowance and a record of who has worked where.

Appraisal & training

Review cycles, ratings against the grade, and a training history that shows which engineers are qualified for which chemistry.

Employee self-service

Staff apply for leave, check a balance, pull a payslip and correct their own details, instead of asking HR to look it up for them.

Separation & settlement

Resignation, notice period, clearance checklist and final settlement, with the leaver dropping out of payroll on the right date automatically.

Payroll application

The salary run, the statutory filings and the paperwork the finance team is asked for, in a fixed monthly cycle.

Salary structures

Earning and deduction heads defined per grade, with components that are fixed, formula-driven or a percentage of another head.

Monthly salary processing

A locked cycle: freeze attendance, process, review the register, correct, re-process, approve. Nothing is paid from an unapproved run.

Statutory deductions

Provident fund, ESI, professional tax and income tax deducted at source, each with its own eligibility ceiling and rate, kept in configuration rather than in code.

Payslips & tax statements

Payslips generated from the approved run, plus the annual statements and investment declarations employees ask for at year end.

Loans, advances & arrears

Salary advances and loans recovered over instalments, and arrears from a backdated increment paid in the month they are approved.

Bank transfer files

The bank's own upload format produced from the approved register, so the disbursement is not retyped into the banking portal.

Registers & reports

Salary register, department-wise cost, statutory summaries and the reconciliations the auditors ask for, exportable to Excel.

Roles & audit trail

Who can see a salary, who can approve a run, and a stamped record of every change to a figure after it was first entered.

How it ran

Nine months, delivered in stages.

HR went live before payroll did. That order is deliberate: payroll is only as good as the employee and attendance data underneath it, so we let that data settle first.

April 2023

Discovery & process mapping

We sat with HR, accounts and the service team, took apart the existing workbooks and wrote down the rules that were only in people's heads: grades, allowances, leave accrual, tour rates.
May – June 2023

Data model & HR build

The employee master, organisation structure and document store first, then recruitment, onboarding and the leave and attendance engine on top of it.
July – September 2023

Payroll build

Salary structures, the processing cycle and the statutory heads, built against real historical months so each run could be compared against a payslip the client already trusted.
October 2023

Migration & parallel run

Historical employee, leave and salary data migrated, then the new payroll run alongside the spreadsheet for a full cycle until the two agreed to the rupee.
November 2023

UAT & training

User acceptance testing with the people who would own the system, role by role, followed by training and a written operating procedure for the monthly close.
30 December 2023

Production handover

Go-live on the client's own infrastructure, with the spreadsheets retired and CodeFix IT on hand through the first live closes.
2024 – 2027

Contractual change requests

A standing agreement: statutory changes, new reports and new requirements are our responsibility to deliver, under contract, until the end of 2027.

How it was built

Chosen to still be maintainable in 2027.

We committed to supporting this system for four years past delivery, so the technical choices are conservative on purpose: a well-trodden stack, a normalised schema and rules in configuration rather than in code.

Application

PHP
Laravel
Blade
Queued jobs

Data

MySQL
Normalised schema
Transactional salary runs
Audit tables

Interface

Bootstrap
jQuery
Server-rendered
Excel & PDF export

Controls

Role-based access
Approval workflow
Change log
Scheduled backups

Rules in configuration

Rates, ceilings, grades and allowance formulas are data the client can change. A statutory revision is a configuration change, not a release.

A salary run is reversible

Processing writes a versioned run that can be rolled back and re-processed. Nobody has to edit a paid figure to fix a mistake.

Every number can be explained

Any figure on a payslip traces back to the attendance day, the structure component and the approval that produced it.

The outcome

A month-end close that is a process, not an event.

One source of truth for people data
HR, accounts and management read the same employee record. The spreadsheets that used to disagree with each other are gone.
Payroll no longer depends on one person
The statutory maths lives in the system, documented and configurable. The monthly close is a written procedure any trained user can run.
Attendance is captured once
What the roster records is what payroll pays. The rekeying step, and the errors that came with it, has been removed entirely.
Queries are answerable
When an employee or an auditor questions a figure, the trail from payslip back to source is on screen in a few clicks.
Field work is visible
Site visits by service engineers are recorded against the customer plant, so allowances are paid on record rather than on recollection.
A known cost to maintain
Change requests are covered by contract until the end of 2027, so the client budgets for the system instead of reacting to it.

Still our responsibility

Delivered in 2023. Under our care until 2027.

Handover was not the end of the engagement. Under the current contract CodeFix IT carries the responsibility for change requests on both applications through to the end of 2027: statutory revisions, new reports, new allowance types and whatever else the business asks the system to do next.

Change requests New requirements specified, built, tested and released under the existing contract.
Statutory upkeep When a rate, ceiling or filing requirement changes, the configuration and the reports change with it.
Close support Someone who knows the system is available around the monthly salary run, not just during office hours in theory.

Running your people on spreadsheets? We build HR and payroll systems that fit how a business actually pays people, then stay responsible for them for years. Tell us what your month-end looks like and we will tell you honestly what it would take.

Talk to us about it +880 1327-422480

One system for every person on the payroll, from the plant floor to the head office.