Switching away from Keka is more friction than most companies expect. The data export isn’t always clean, Keka’s support during an exit can be slow, and if you’re mid-year there’s YTD data that has to come across correctly or your TDS calculations for the rest of the year will be off. This guide covers what to export, how to move it, what to watch, and how to make sure salary day is not affected.
Before You Start Three Decisions to Make
Pick your go-live date carefully. The cleanest migrations happen at the start of April (new financial year) or the start of a new month. Never mid-month. If you’re migrating mid-year, you’ll need to carry YTD figures for every employee into the new system PF contributions, TDS deducted, ESI paid, LOP taken month by month. Miss any of these and the new system will calculate TDS incorrectly for the rest of the year.
Don’t cancel Keka until you’ve confirmed the new system is live. Keep Keka active in read-only mode for at least 3 months after migration. You will need to look things up an employee queries their payslip from two months ago, a labour inspector asks for last quarter’s PF data, someone needs their Form 16 from the previous year. Keka with read-only access costs less than a full subscription and is worth keeping.
Assign one person to own the migration. Not a committee. One person who’s responsible for the timeline, who chases Keka for data exports, who verifies the first payroll run on the new system. Migrations that have multiple owners tend to drift and usually end with the old system still running in parallel three months later than planned.
What to Export from Keka Complete Data Checklist
| Data to Export from Keka | Format Available | Why You Need It |
|---|---|---|
| Employee master data | CSV / Excel | Names, DOBs, PANs, Aadhaar, bank details, UAN numbers |
| Salary structures | CSV | CTC breakup per employee basis for new system configuration |
| YTD payroll figures | CSV per month | Essential for mid-year migration TDS, PF, ESI calculations |
| Leave balances | CSV | Carry-forward balances to new system on migration date |
| Attendance history | CSV | Previous months’ records for reference and dispute resolution |
| Payslips (PDF archive) | Bulk PDF download | Employee records must be accessible after migration |
| Statutory filing records | PDF / CSV | PF ECR, ESI challans, TDS challans needed for compliance audit trail |
| Form 16 / Form 130 history | Prior year tax certificates employees may request these |
Export everything before giving Keka notice of termination. Once you’re in an exit process, vendors become slower to support data requests. Get the data first, then initiate the cancellation.
| The YTD figures are the most critical export for mid-year migration: For each employee you need: gross salary paid month by month from April to the migration month, TDS deducted each month, PF employee + employer contributions each month, ESI contributions if applicable, LOP days each month, investment declarations submitted (80C, 80D, HRA). Missing any of these means the new system recalculates from scratch and your year-end TDS will be wrong. |
Getting the Data Out of Keka Where People Get Stuck
Keka’s data export is through Settings → Data Management → Export. Most employee data exports cleanly. The things that cause delays:
Payslip bulk download Keka generates these on request but bulk downloads for 12 months across 80 employees can take hours to generate. Submit the request well in advance at least 10 days before go-live.
Custom fields and salary components if your company has non-standard salary components configured in Keka (project allowance, relocation allowance, anything you added manually), export the configuration document alongside the data. The new system will need to know how these were structured.
Attendance history Keka’s attendance export sometimes misses regularised records. After exporting, spot-check 3–4 employees by comparing the CSV against their Keka dashboard. If regularised entries are missing, export those separately from the attendance correction log.
PF / ESI statutory files ECR files and ESI challans are under Payroll → Compliance → Reports. Download all months for the current financial year and the previous two years. Store these separately from the employee data these are your compliance audit trail.
Setting Up the New System What Goes In First
The order matters. Don’t start entering employee data until the system is configured. A common mistake: someone uploads 80 employee records and then realises the salary structure isn’t set up yet, which means the records have to be re-imported with the right structure attached.
Configure first: company details, financial year settings, pay schedule (monthly, twice monthly), salary components (basic, HRA, special allowance must match what was in Keka), PF, ESI, and Professional Tax settings per state, leave types and accrual rules, shift configurations.
Then import: employee master data, salary structures per employee, leave balances as of migration date, YTD figures if mid-year migration.
Then test: run a test payroll for 10–15 employees before the first live run. Compare the output against the same month’s Keka payslip for those employees. Gross, PF, ESI, PT, TDS, and net all should match. If anything is off, fix the configuration before running payroll for everyone.
Communicating the Change to Employees
Employees notice payroll system changes when the payslip format changes or the self-service app changes. If you don’t communicate in advance, HR gets 50 queries on salary day from people who can’t find their payslip.
What to tell them: from [date], attendance and payroll will move to [new system]. Download the [new app]. Log in with your email ID. Your payslips from [date] onwards will be on the new system. Previous payslips are available in Keka until [date]. Leave balances have been carried over check them on [new system] and flag any discrepancy within 7 days.
One specific thing to tell employees who are mid-investment-declaration cycle: they’ll need to re-submit their investment declarations on the new system. Keka doesn’t export these the new system won’t have them unless employees re-enter.
The First Payroll Run on the New System
Run it early not on the last working day of the month. For most companies that means processing by the 27th or 28th so any errors have a day or two to be caught and corrected before bank transfer.
Before releasing salaries: verify gross salary for 5 high-variability employees (someone with LOP, someone with a mid-month salary revision, someone on ESI, someone above the PF ceiling, someone who joined mid-month). These edge cases are where configuration errors surface. If they’re right, everything else is almost certainly right too.
The bank transfer file: most payroll software generates a file in the format your bank expects (HDFC, ICICI, SBI each have slightly different formats). Confirm with your bank which format they accept before go-live, not on salary day.
Which HRMS to Move To
Under 50 employees attendance + payroll connected, lower cost: Waggex ₹2,499/month for 50 employees. GPS and face attendance built in. PF, ESI, TDS, PT automated. Dedicated account manager for first month’s setup. No implementation fee. See Waggex pricing.
Compliance depth, any size, cost-sensitive: greytHR ₹3,495/month for 50 employees. Strongest statutory compliance engine in the Indian market.
Performance management still needed at 100+ employees: another enterprise platform at comparable pricing to Keka. At that size, Keka itself might still make sense if the issue was pricing at a lower headcount Keka’s per-employee cost drops as headcount grows.
Daily wages, manufacturing, complex shifts: factoHR. Keka doesn’t handle daily wage payroll well. factoHR does.