What Zoho People Does, and What It Hands to Payroll.

If you searched for Zoho People, you probably want to know two things the product page answers slowly: what it actually does, and where it stops. The short version is that Zoho People is the people system in the Zoho suite, it holds the employee, and it is neither the payroll nor the hiring system; its value is in what it hands to those two. Four minutes, no prices, because they change and the structure does not. Everything on screen is a mock demo with sample data. At the centre is the employee record: name, title, manager, location, start date, documents, and the organisation chart those records make.

Everything else in the application hangs off it. Self-service means the employee updates her own address and downloads her own documents, and the people team stops being the switchboard for questions the record can answer. That record is the thing the application is for. If a company of fifty people keeps it in a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is the people system, and every other tool below is a workaround for not having one. Around the record, five things the application runs. Leave: a request, a one-click approval, a balance that is right without a spreadsheet.

Attendance: who was in, from a check-in rather than a separate clock. Onboarding: a checklist that runs the same way for every hire, with tasks assigned to the right people on the right day. Timesheets: hours by project, which matters most for a company that bills them. And performance reviews on a schedule, with the record of them kept. On the higher editions there is also an internal help desk for people questions and a learning module. Those are real; for most companies our size the five above are the reason to buy.

Here is where it stops, and why that is the point. Zoho People does not pay anyone. Attendance, leave and timesheets flow out of it into Zoho Payroll, which runs the pay. Billable timesheets flow into Zoho Books, which invoices the client for the hours. And the employee record is shared with Zoho CRM and the project tools, so the sales user and the project member are the same person as the employee, not three re-typed copies. The hiring side is the same shape in reverse: Zoho Recruit holds the candidate and hands the accepted offer to Zoho People once.

We have a separate video on that handoff. The rule in both directions is one owner per fact: the people system owns the employee, and the systems around it read. The article behind this video lists six signs, and says three or more means you are ready. Leave lives in a spreadsheet and the balances are wrong. Approvals happen in email or chat with no record. Onboarding is improvised every time. A simple people question takes someone an afternoon to assemble. Compliance documents are scattered across drives. And headcount is growing, so all of the above is getting worse.

Two things to do before the first login. Clean the employee data, because the application will faithfully hold whatever you import. And plan the handoffs to payroll and the books first, with one person named as the owner of the record, because an unconnected people system is one more place to re-type the start date. Zoho People holds the employee and runs leave, attendance, onboarding, time and reviews around that record; it hands the pay facts to Zoho Payroll and the billable hours to Zoho Books, and it is not the hiring system.

Editions are priced per employee per month; we quoted no numbers, and the live page has today's. We are CodeStringers, a Zoho authorised consulting partner. The written explainer and the onboarding handoff video are linked below.