HR Stack TCO Calculator

Licences are usually about half the cost of running a multi-system HR stack. Model the other half — reconciliation labour, payroll error correction and integration upkeep — and compare it against a consolidated alternative with migration cost included.

Your current stack

Number of people systems

Include the survey tool and the spreadsheet nobody owns.

Total annual licence spend

₹18.00 L

Data handoffs between systems

Any point where data leaves one system and enters another, by API or by hand.

Hours per handoff, per month

Ask the person who does it. Top-down estimates run low.

Loaded hourly cost of that time

₹1,200 per hour

Payroll corrections per run

Every correction, including those caught before disbursement.

Pay runs per year

Cost to investigate and fix one correction

EY put this at $291 in the US in 2022. Use your own loaded rate.

Annual integration upkeep

Middleware licences plus engineering or vendor time.

Consolidated alternative

Annual licence spend, consolidated

₹14.40 L

Remaining reconciliation, hours per month

Rarely zero — bank files, statutory returns and audit pulls still need checking.

Assumed reduction in corrections — 50%

An assumption, not a measured outcome. No study we found isolates the effect of consolidation. Set it to zero to see the case without it.

Migration cost, one-off

The largest source of error in this model. If your data is messy, double it.

Not modelled here: retraining, the parallel-run period where you pay for both stacks, productivity disruption, and loss of depth in any specialist tool you retire.

Current stack, three years

₹1.13 cr

₹37.55 L a year

Consolidated, three years

₹63.89 L

₹19.30 L a year plus ₹6.00 L migration

Three-year difference

₹48.77 L

in favour of consolidating

Payback on migration

3.9 mo

at the annual difference above

Where your current annual cost sits

52% of your annual cost — ₹19.55 L — never appears on a software invoice, and so is rarely weighed against the software decision that produced it.

LicencesOn the invoice₹18.00 L

Error correctionInvisible₹8.64 L

Reconciliation labourInvisible₹6.91 L

Integration upkeepInvisible₹4.00 L

Capacity, shown separately from cash

Consolidating would free roughly 528 hours a year of reconciliation work — currently 576 hours, falling to 48. At your loaded rate that is nominally ₹6.34 L, and it is included in the totals above.

Present this to finance as capacity, not savings. It becomes cash only if those hours are eliminated or redeployed to work of equivalent value. Claiming it as a hard saving is the fastest way to lose credibility in the room.

The seven cost layers, explained

Including what consolidation does not save — and why we refuse to quote an integration benchmark.

Read the full model →

Every default in this calculator is an assumption chosen for illustration, not a benchmark or a Helion price. The model excludes retraining, parallel-run periods and productivity disruption during migration, all of which are real costs of consolidation. Reconciliation hours saved are shown as capacity, not cash — they convert to cash only if the hours are redeployed or eliminated. Helion sells a consolidated platform and therefore has a commercial interest in the outcome of this comparison; the inputs are exposed so you can test it against your own records. General information, not financial advice.