CargoFL transforming payroll management for India’s State Road Transport Units (STUs)

What started as a simple fleet management system for Pune’s State Road Transport Units soon turned out into a full fledged cloud ERP for transport corporations (including Payroll & HR), the story is interesting as almost all state run transport units in India have huge fleets of buses and completely run in an offline mode. This story is about how the payroll process was made digital via the CargoFL product…

A large number of State Road Transport Corporations in India rely on a legacy payroll management system which involves a lot of paper work and is a monotonous process to handle. Maintaining registers filled with records of employee information, their salaries, attendance records, etc is tedious and takes a huge toll on the productivity of these organisations. It also takes up space and there are many recurring problems due to errors in human calculations.

These State Road Transport Organisations in India can indeed buy (afford) standards cloud based payroll softwares out in the market like Zoho Invoice, Quickbooks etc but these softwares are generic and they do not support payroll customizations specific to state transport organisations.

With the advancements in technology, transport corporations are now moving to a digital approach to maintain data. This involves maintaining excel sheets of records of employees, their salaries, leaves, reimbursements, bonuses, promotions, increments, deductions etc. Though payroll management using excel spreadsheets simplifies the procedure to some extent, it still remains a time-consuming, completely offline and slow process. Moreover, it is extremely tedious for HR and finance teams to navigate through hundreds of excel sheets.

With changing circumstances especially right now in the middle of Covid pandemic and to cater to the increasing day-to-day issues faced by employees, transport units need to digitise and automate their payroll systems using cloud based softwares.

One such example is PMPML(Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd.), the transport body in Pune, Maharashtra, India which has adopted RTMS (Road Transport Management System) software introduced by CargoFL.

The total payroll life cycle is managed automatically in a digital way via the CargoFL RTMS software. Unlike generic invoice softwares available in the market, CargoFL comes with advanced customisation features that allow users to create their own “business rules” and “payment buckets”. For e.g. certain custom buckets include “PMC Deduction”, “DW PF Deduction”, “Homage Fund”, “Flag Fund” etc and custom business rules like “Partial Payments in multiple chunks”, “Supplementary arrears” etc.

With CargoFL RTMS product, 10000+ (10K+) employees of PMPML have gone digital i.e. from an offline to online mode, the practice of issuing physical salary slips has now ended and the payroll functions are completely digitised. The impact has been huge, a reduction in paper prints by 120K papers per month, the physical visits to HR by employees went down by 83% as things moved from a physical to a digital mode.

The CargoFL product at its very core is for fleet management but with this project we learnt how to build custom stand alone pluggable features in CargoFL that can add significant value to our customers. The world is slowly moving towards “Personalization” of experiences and that can only happen when products can customise experiences on the fly, this is exactly what we have achieved at PMPML, CargoFL with its strong fleet management capabilities and customised payroll & hr modules delivering significant business value to various departments…

We at CargoFL are now ready to scale this to all State Transport Units (STUs) as a single cloud ERP software delivering end to end solution across all STU functions…