The India-native EOR.
Without the panic.

An EOR is a third party that legally employs your hire on your behalf. The hire works for you on a daily basis but is on the EOR's payroll, PF code, and ESIC registration. Versatile is the actual Indian entity (Foo Falcon Technologies Pvt Ltd) doing this. We are not a reseller for someone else.

That difference matters when something breaks. A reseller cannot fix a notice from the EPFO. The entity holder can.

Five business days from contract signed to first paycheck scheduled. We have done it in three when documents were ready and the start date was urgent. The 5-day SLA is in your contract. If we miss it, the first month is free.

All eight statutory items: EPF, ESIC, Profession Tax, TDS, gratuity provisioning, Labour Welfare Fund, Shops & Establishments registration, and New Labour Code 2025-26 compliance.

Plus a trained compliance team on email (4-6hr TAT, named manager on every account), USD invoicing, no setup fee, no exit fee, and a free first month. The $149 is the entire price. There is no second invoice.

No. That is the entire point of EOR. We are the Indian entity for legal and statutory purposes. You pay our USD invoice. We employ your team in India. You manage them as if they were direct hires anywhere else in your org.

Most founders move to a subsidiary structure once their India team passes 25 to 35 employees. We help with that transition when the time comes.

Deel, Remote, and G-P are global EORs covering 80+ countries. In India specifically, they typically route through a local partner. Versatile is that partner, except we work directly with you.

That cuts the markup, the SLA round-trip, and the risk that India compliance updates lag the actual code. It also means founder-direct support instead of a tier-one help desk in another timezone.

Month-to-month, no exit fees, no notice penalties. If you exit mid-month, we run F&F (full and final) settlement within statutory windows. Gratuity vests as it would on any other Indian payroll.

If you are migrating to your own subsidiary, we hand off employee records, PF/UAN continuity, and gratuity trust balances. We have done four of these handoffs to date with zero employee disruption.

Yes. We are registered or onboarded in all 28 states and 8 union territories. Profession tax slabs, state-specific Labour Welfare Fund, Shops & Establishments licenses for the city your hire works from. Active in 9 cities currently. Onboarding into a new state takes one cycle.

Every account gets a named compliance manager from our trained team of India payroll and statutory specialists. Email goes to support@versatile.club, we reply within 4-6 hours, and the same person handles your account month over month so you are not re-explaining context.

The team handles payroll runs, EPF and ESIC filings, Profession Tax remittance, TDS, gratuity provisioning, Form 16 issuance, and employee questions. Behind your named manager: a filing specialist, a payroll lead, and a senior compliance reviewer for anything sensitive. Founder-led, not founder-bottlenecked.

Your hires are paid in INR by Versatile (the Indian entity), drawn from a holding account we manage. Statutory contributions go directly to EPFO, ESIC, and the relevant state authorities. You receive a single consolidated USD invoice on the 1st of each month, payable Net 7 by ACH or wire from a US/UK-friendly entity.

You never deal with INR conversion, FX rates, or foreign-currency wires. Your books stay in dollars. Your auditor sees one line item per employee per month. Nothing buried in service charges, no markup on statutory items.

India consolidated 29 federal labour laws into 4 codes (Wages, Industrial Relations, Social Security, OSH). Most relevant: Basic + Dearness Allowance must equal at least 50% of CTC. This rebalanced compensation structures across the country and changed PF and gratuity calculations.

We rebased every employee in our book before the deadline, with zero impact to take-home pay. New hires onboarded after rebase use the compliant CTC structure from Day 1. Most India EORs were still updating their systems three months later.

India payroll is state-specific. Profession Tax slabs differ by state. Shops & Establishments licenses are city-specific. If your hire moves from Bengaluru to Hyderabad, we update the registration, switch the PT remittance, and re-issue the offer letter to reflect the new state.

Remote work within India is fine. We need their physical work location for compliance, not their team's location. PF and ESIC follow the employee, not the employer's office. We've handled cross-state moves for clients in 9 cities so far.

The first calendar month after onboarding is at zero EOR fee. You pay the employee's Indian-side compensation and statutory contributions (PF, ESIC, TDS), but the $149 EOR fee is waived. You see the entire system run in production before paying us anything.

This is risk reversal, not a discount. If our 5-day SLA, our compliance handling, or our email POC support disappoints in month 1, you exit with no commitment and the only money out is real employee compensation (which would have been paid regardless).

Yes. Most founders move from EOR to a wholly-owned Indian subsidiary (Pvt Ltd) once their team passes 25 to 35 employees. Below that headcount, EOR is structurally cheaper and faster. Above it, the savings on per-employee fees usually justify the cost of running a captive.

We do the migration handoff: continuity of UAN/PF, gratuity trust transfer, employee record handoff, with zero disruption to the engineering team. We've completed four such handoffs to date. We can also help scope and stand up a Global Capability Center if you're going from 0 to 50 hires in a single quarter.

Contractor of Record (CoR) treats your hire as a B2B contractor in India. EOR treats them as a full-time employee with PF, ESIC, gratuity, and Form 16. For most founders hiring engineers, designers, and operators, EOR is the right structure - both for compliance and for retention.

CoR is appropriate for short-term project work (under 6 months), specialized consultants, or freelancers. India's Code on Wages and the misclassification risk make CoR a poor fit for full-time, long-term hires. We do offer CoR for the right cases, but EOR is the default conversation.

Wisemonk, Multiplier, and Skuad are India-focused EORs. We compete on three things: structural identity (we are the entity, full PF and ESIC under our name; some competitors operate on partner infrastructure), USD invoicing depth (clean books, no FX exposure on your side), and a trained compliance team that reads every inbound email with a 4-6 hour TAT.

The simplest test: ask the competitor for their PF establishment code and their Shops & Establishments license number. If they cannot produce both within 24 hours, they are not the entity employing your team. Our codes and licenses are on every offer letter.

The inspection is on Versatile, not on you. Inspectors visit our registered office, examine our records (PF challans, ESIC returns, employee files), and confirm compliance. Your team is not contacted. Your business is not audited. The notice and the response sit on our entity.

We have handled half-yearly inspections, special audits, and one Section 7A inquiry. Outcome to date: zero notices issued, zero penalties, zero disruption to client teams. The named compliance manager on your account drafts our response within 24 hours of any notice landing.

Equity is typically issued by your US/UK parent entity directly to the Indian-resident employee. We coordinate the RBI reporting (LRS or specific routes), the perquisite tax computation when options vest, and the TDS deduction at exercise. The employee files the equity income on their Indian tax return; we issue the Form 16 reflecting the perquisite.

Most clients use either ISO/NSO grants from the US parent or a phantom-equity bonus structure paid through Versatile payroll. We've supported both. Your stock plan administrator (Carta, Pulley, custom) integrates with our payroll for the perquisite calculation.

Your hire is the legal employee of Versatile (Foo Falcon Technologies Pvt Ltd) for compliance purposes, but they work for you on a daily basis. For employment paperwork, payslips, Form 16, statutory queries, and PF/ESIC issues, they email support@versatile.club. A named compliance manager handles their account.

For day-to-day work, they report to you. Versatile does not interject into your hire's work life. We exist to handle the paperwork that would otherwise eat 20+ hours of HR time every month for an India team of 5-15 people.

An EOR (Employer of Record) in India is the legal employer of your hire on paper. The hire signs the offer letter from the EOR's entity. The EOR runs payroll, handles PF, ESIC, gratuity, professional tax, TDS, files all statutory returns, and issues the payslip. You manage the work; the EOR manages the employment.

A PEO (Professional Employer Organization) in the US sense does not legally exist in India. There is no Indian PEO statute. What some providers call "India PEO" is usually a co-employment arrangement that has no enforceable legal basis here, or it is just an EOR with marketing language. Use EOR. Anyone calling it "India PEO" is bending words.

For US founders comparing EOR vs PEO: in India, EOR is the only path that carries no Permanent Establishment risk for your US parent.

Indian salary structures (CTC = Cost to Company) are line-itemed for tax efficiency. A typical $40K USD package for a Bengaluru engineer at Versatile breaks down as: Basic ~40%, HRA ~20%, special allowance, LTA, food allowance, telephone reimbursement, gratuity (4.81% of basic), provident fund (12% employer + 12% employee on basic), professional tax, plus a small variable. Statutory contributions are roughly 15-20% on top of basic.

We optimize the structure to maximize the hire's take-home while staying audit-clean. Wrong structures inflate Form 16 tax burden by 8-12% with no benefit to anyone. We have a CTC calculator on file that we walk every new client through during onboarding.

The total invoice you see (USD) covers gross CTC + statutory + EOR fee. No FX markup. No hidden line items. CFO can hand it to the auditor on the first ask.

Every Versatile-issued offer letter includes an IP Assignment clause that vests all work product (code, designs, documents, inventions) directly to your US/UK parent, with explicit waivers of moral rights to the extent permitted under the Indian Copyright Act 1957. This is the same clause your existing engineering team in Mountain View signs.

Sub-clauses we include: confidentiality, trade secret protection, post-termination non-disclosure, return of materials, and a covenant that any pre-existing IP brought to the role is disclosed and excluded. The letter is governed by Indian law (mandatory for an Indian employee) but IP assignment is in your favor. We can share a redacted sample of our standard letter on request.

For sensitive workloads (HIPAA, SOC 2, FedRAMP), we layer additional NDAs and BAA-equivalent confidentiality. Our professional indemnity policy covers IP-related claims up to the policy limit; the certificate is available on request.

The migration runs inside one payroll cycle. We have done it 6 times in the last 18 months, including ePublishing in June 2025, and the engineer never feels a gap.

Step 1, week 1: We collect the existing employment contract, latest payslip, PF UAN, ESIC IP number, gratuity vesting date, leave balance, and bonus accruals from the outgoing provider. We open transferred-in records on our PF code with full UAN continuity (no fresh UAN, no PF reset). Step 2, week 2-3: New offer letter from Versatile, same CTC and same effective date, with our compliance manager walking the engineer through the 15-minute paperwork. Step 3, day 1 of the next month: Outgoing provider stops payroll, we run payroll, payslip lands on the same day of the month. The engineer does not miss a salary. Their PF balance is intact. Their gratuity clock keeps ticking.

You write a 30-day termination notice to your current EOR. We invoice $0 for the migration. First month with us is free.

For your CFO, controller, or external auditor, every month we share a statutory liability accrual report mapped to your GL: PF employer contribution, ESIC employer contribution, gratuity accrual (4.81% of basic per month), professional tax, leave encashment liability, and TDS deducted. Each line is reconciled to the consolidated USD invoice we send.

For year-end audit, we provide: signed Form 16 for each India employee, ECR (Electronic Challan-cum-Return) for PF, ESIC challans, gratuity actuarial valuation (we coordinate with your actuary), and a complete payroll register with employer-side cost breakdown. Most of our clients hand this directly to their Big-4 auditor; no rework needed.

No hidden FX markup. The exchange rate on every invoice matches the RBI reference rate on the invoice date, with our fee added in USD as a separate line. Your auditor can reconcile against any FX feed.