MAM
GST: How concerned should the advertising world be?
MUMBAI: The Finance Act of India 1994 (defines ‘advertising’ as the sale of space or time services, and any such facility offered by an advertising agency or person is considered a taxable service. Why the need to put such a dry perspective to an otherwise vibrant and creative business?
The answer is closely related the top trending topic among both netizens and citizens : Goods and Services Tax AKA GST.
This very definition highlights that the advertising fraternity, much like any service sector industry functions in compliance with ‘Service Tax’ that is levied by the central government, whether it is on the advertiser, the seller or the agency facilitating. Therefore any major rehaul of the service tax system makes an impact on the sector — be it good or bad.
So far industry observers and stakeholders have identified two key areas where GST has direct or indirect implication on the advertising industry of India — first is the incidence of tax or tax burden levied on the service sector, and secondly, cost of adapting new processes to deal with new tax regime.
“In compliance with the general commentary on the issue, industry is predicting that the tax on services is likely to go up due to GST. Clearly, from our perspective, that will not be a welcome piece of news. Especially at a time when India is looking to speed up the process of economic growth, in which this industry has a very vital role to play. It would be in the country’s interest, our industry’s interest and that of our many clients’ that this activity is incentive-ised rather than the other way round,” the newly elected AAAI president and Publicis south Asia CEO Nakul Chopra observes.
“We hope that the government in its wisdom, will hopefully keep the taxes at the current level or minimise any hikes,” Chopra adds.
Elaborating on his second point of concern, Chopra says: ”The government has been working for some time on the IT backbone which is required to handle the immense change in the process in transitioning from Service Tax era to GST. This can also have a lot of implications for our industry and our members. Manufacturing industry, to which excise and sales tax, are already on similar processes that is projected to implement GST. It won’t be a large shift for them. Whereas service tax is administered in a completely different way and has been a central levy. Hence, for the advertising industry it is a totally different story.“
Currently it is being taxed at 15 per cent after progressively going up over the years.
When it comes to the advertiser – media owner equation, barring radio and television media, most other print and digital forms of advertising enjoyed tax exemption under special provisions from the government, until finance minister Arun Jaitley removed digital advertisement from ‘Negative list of Services,’ in Budget 2014, and brought digital ads under the purview of service tax. This, observers, believe has already made the ecosystem more challenging for digital media to compete with the rest, being the late entrant in it. Although, it is true that analysts have also projected that GST will facilitate a larger digital penetration in the country as it would ease up the logistics in the tech industry.
Echoing Chopra’s concern, Dentsu Aegis Network chairman and South Asia CEO Ashish Bhasin opines: “As of now the advice from noted consultants seems to be that GST will actually make taxation much more complicated, particularly for advertising agencies, who operate in multiple states because there will be a Central GST and State GST, which will increase the complexity contrary to the government’s intent.”
Bhasin hopes the government will be able to focus on this area and address this issue urgently so that the bill achieves its intent of simplification and ease of business, even for the service industry.
Much of which will depend on the exact rate that is yet to be decided. Till now the discussions were mostly on whether the amendment will be made in the first place, is what most industry stalwarts had to say. But now there will be a more focused debate on the taxation rate and the method of administration.
The concerns over the bill haven’t completely overshadowed the promise of an economic growth that the new tax regime is expected to bring with itself. Bhasin feels that GST willl be brilliant for business in general, once it settles down. “Some industries will gain significantly, not just by the adjustment of rates but by the simplification of the process,” he says.
“If GST has a lot of positive impact on our clients, that eventually would benefit us as well. The onus is upon us as an industry body to address the concerns so that the advertising industry can make the most of the positives that come with GST,” Chopra states.
Most industry observers believe that some sectors that were heavily taxed like the automobile category will now see government levies being more than halved. That will lead to a reduction in costs for the end consumer, which is likely to lead to a surge in sales, that will then lead to more spends on advertising and marketing, and that could then lead to a spurt in business for the advertising industry – both in terms of creative and media planning and buying.
“Now the industry can look at it as a glass half empty or half-full,” says an advertising veteran. “The bullet had to be bit sometime, the best time is now. Yes, the administration and paper work of what appears to be a complicated exercise involving Central GST, State GST and an IGST,, but in the long run we will learn to live with it. So I guess we will have to go with both the positive and negative impacts and reap the benefits when everything settles down.”
Bhasin is willing to look at GST beyond its short-term impact on the sector. “There may be some interim inflationary effect because of the potential increase in rate from 15 per cent service tax to say 18 per cent of GST but I think since the set off is going to be available, other benefits will far outweigh this disadvantages,” he adds on an optimistic note.
If your HR software still feels like a glorified spreadsheet with a login page, 2026 is the year to rethink everything. Especially as HR software in India evolves rapidly to meet compliance, scale, and workforce complexity.
Why 2019 HRMS You Chose Probably Isn’t Enough Anymore?
To be honest, most businesses didn’t really choose their HRMS; they just happened to get it. A vendor demo, a short deadline, and a CFO who approved the budget all made you stuck with a system that was “good enough” at the time.
Today, that same system is struggling to keep up with hybrid work, distributed teams, complicated compliance issues, and employee expectations that have changed a lot in just five years. This is exactly where modern HR automation software is redefining how HR teams operate, moving from manual processes to intelligent workflows.
As per the 2025 report by Gartner, more than 58% of HR professionals stated that their existing software did not fully enable their workforce strategy. On the other hand, as per the HR Tech survey conducted by PwC, those companies that invested in modern HRMS systems were able to improve their HR efficiency level by up to 22% and reduce compliance penalties by 15%.
The takeaway is that the HRMS world has grown up, and so have the expectations surrounding it. Be it the CHRO developing the company’s digital transformation plan, the CFO analysing return-on-investment figures, or the CEO looking to grow his organisation without HR being a constraint, this checklist will help you achieve success.
This is your list of top 10 HRMS features your team simply cannot do without in 2026.
1. Unified Employee Data Architecture (Single Source of Truth)
This is the base on which everything else is built. A modern HRMS must get rid of data silos by keeping one central, real-time record of each employee from the time they are hired until they leave. That means that all of your payroll data, performance history, leave balances, benefits enrolment, document management, and compliance records are all in one place.
For companies with more than 500 employees, having HR data that is not organised or that are simply exploring HR outsourcing can cost between $15,000 and $40,000 a year just to fix (Deloitte, 2024). The number goes up quickly when you include the compliance risk from records that don’t match.
What to look for:
- Bidirectional synchronization between modules
- API-first approach to integration
- Access based on roles and responsibilities
- Audits that can withstand a detailed examination, be it by an internal auditor or an employment agency inspection.
2. Payroll That Runs Automatically and Stays Compliant
Payroll has surpassed being a routine month-end task to becoming intelligent software that must be able to handle variable pay packages, multistate/multinationals’ taxation, loans, statutory deductions (PF, ESI, TDS, and PT for India) and even off-cycle processing without a hitch.
The real differentiator in 2026? HR automation software based compliance. Laws about work change. Tax brackets change. There is a fluctuation in the minimum wage based on the region. A good payroll system should always update itself with respect to changes in regulations.
Important numbers to remember:
- 40% of small and medium-sized businesses have to pay payroll penalties every year because of mistakes made while processing (IRS, 2024)
- When compared to manual methods, automated payroll systems can cut processing time by as much as 80%.
- According to SHRM (2025), companies that use integrated payroll-HRMS platforms make 93% fewer mistakes when entering data.
For businesses operating across multiple geographies, especially those leveraging EOR (Employer of Record) arrangements. Your payroll software also needs to interface cleanly with local in-country payroll engines without creating reconciliation nightmares.
3. Employer of Record (EOR) Integration and Global Hiring Support
It’s not just multinationals that hire people from other countries anymore. More and more, startups, mid-sized businesses, and even businesses that only operate in one area are putting together teams that work across state and national lines. And that’s where things get really complicated.
Companies can legally hire workers in places where they don’t have a legal entity through an EOR (Employer of Record) arrangement. But managing those workers on a platform that wasn’t made for it is a mess. Many businesses in India are now combining HR outsourcing models with EOR services to simplify global hiring. Your HRMS must have built-in support for EOR workflows, such as classifying contractors and employees, following local compliance rules, processing payroll in any currency, and creating documents that meet local regulatory standards.
In 2025, compliance confidence was the top driver for 72% of companies using EOR services, according to Velocity Global, but only 34% of those companies said their HRMS could manage such processes.
Request: Onboarding processes suitable for EOR usage, employment contracts valid for multiple jurisdictions, and an overall consolidated overview of all global employees, whether direct or EOR-based.
4. End-to-End Recruitment and Onboarding Automation
The best talent doesn’t wait. The average staffing and recruitment time is around 42 days (LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2025), therefore, a long and inefficient recruitment process is a competitive disadvantage. This is where HR automation software comes in as a competitive advantage, streamlining hiring workflows, reducing manual intervention and ensuring onboarding is consistent, fast and structured.
More importantly, onboarding automation is where many platforms still fall short. Poor onboarding is expensive: research from SHRM shows that replacing a single employee can cost 50–200% of their annual salary, and a significant driver of early attrition is a disorganised onboarding experience.
Look for:
- Automated Offer Letter generation
- Electronic document acquisition and signature
- Customised onboarding tasks based on job role
- An equipment access checklist
- Buddy programme workflow setup and 30-60-90 day follow-up triggers that you can set up without contacting your vendor.
5. Performance Tracking That Matches Real Work
Not only does it belong in the past, but yearly appraisals are indeed harmful to the performance environment. By 2026, if you’re not paying for continuous performance capabilities in your HRMS solution, then you should probably get your money back, as all modern systems come fully loaded with goal-setting frameworks (OKRs, KRAs), immediate feedback, peer reviews, manager check-ins, and career development planning.
Companies that have adopted continuous performance reported to have a 14% rise in employee engagement levels and a reduction of 12% in voluntary turnover (Gallup, 2024). For those executives looking at retention numbers, that is substantial.
Also non-negotiable in 2026: you’ll want to look for systems which include features to protect managers from making biased evaluations and to help identify future leaders in advance of a leadership vacuum occurring.
6. Leave, Attendance, and Workforce Scheduling Intelligence
This sounds basic, and it should be. Yet it remains one of the most complained-about areas in enterprise HRMS. The problem is not in the collection of leave information but in the intelligent aspect. Is there an algorithm that identifies staffing gaps when three employees ask for leave in the same week? Can it support both the scheduling of shifts for field staff and flexible hours for office personnel?
In India specifically, the Shops & Establishments Act regulations vary according to location and industry. This must be automatically managed in the HRMS software, rather than manually configuring each time the rules change.
Must-have features here include
- Leave management based on policy (this includes compensatory leave and encashment)
- Geo-fencing of attendance data
- Shift swapping coordination
- Auto-calculation of overtime compensation and integration with payroll reporting.
7. Global Mobility and Expat Management
For organisations with international operations or employees on cross-border assignments, global mobility management is no longer a “nice-to-have”. It’s a legal necessity. Moving an employee across borders involves immigration compliance, tax equalisation, shadow payrolls, split payrolls, cost-of-living adjustments, and assignment tracking, all of which need to be managed systematically.
Global mobility mismanagement is an underestimated financial risk. A single failed tax equalisation calculation for an expat can create a liability running into tens of thousands of dollars. And with remote work blurring the lines of tax residency, the complexity is only growing.
The features that you should look out for in an HRMS include:
- Assignment lifecycle management
- Compatibility with mobility service providers
- Compliance alerts specific to countries
- Budget planning with costing tools
- Audit trail records for immigration and taxation purposes.
8. Analytics, Workforce Intelligence, and Predictive HR
If your Human Resource Management System can only tell you last year’s headcount or average tenure, it’s simply functioning as a reporting tool. In 2026, the bar is predictive and prescriptive analytics.
Think about what truly matters to leadership: What matters to your organisation’s executives? Which areas are likely to have high turnover within the next 90 days? What’s the return on investment of a training programme initiated six months ago? Where are the gaps in your diversity among your future leaders? How does your pay compare to the market’s?
For the expanding market of HR software within India, predictive analytics will emerge as a significant differentiating factor among corporate leadership. According to a study conducted by McKinsey in 2025, firms that have more sophisticated workforce analytics tools than others have proven 2.3 times more capable of outperforming their competitors in total shareholder returns.
Look for:
- Pre-built HR dashboards
- Custom report builders
- Cohort analysis
- Attrition prediction models
- DEI analytics and data export capabilities for BI tools like Power BI or Tableau.
9. Employee Self-Service, ESS Mobile App, and Conversational AI
Today’s modern workforce, particularly Gen Z and younger millennials, expects work tools that are just as intuitive as consumer applications. The HRMS that asks your employees to email HR for a payslip and calls up the helpdesk for checking their leave balances has been silently diminishing the reputation of your employer brand.
Employee Self-Service (ESS) with complete mobile access has become a basic expectation for 2026. The factor that makes the winning difference between leaders is the use of conversational AI in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants within the HRMS, who will respond to policy-related queries, manage routine requests, and push out relevant data.
Numbers to make the business case: Adoption of ESS leads to a reduction in HR transaction load by 30-50% (Mercer, 2025). Organisations with high adoption of ESS records 23% greater employee satisfaction levels with respect to HR services.
10. Security, Data Privacy, and Compliance Infrastructure
This tends to be overlooked on checklists, precisely the opposite of what should happen. Employee data might be some of the most highly confidential data within your organisation’s databases, including salary details, health care documentation, performance reviews, discipline records, and even financial data.
By 2025, HR data breaches accounted for 23% of total enterprise data breaches in IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach report, and the average financial impact of an HR breach was $4.7 million. In addition, if you are operating in India, there is another legal requirement under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, that your HRMS vendor must help you comply with.
Requirements include:
- SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification
- End-to-end encryption
- DPDP-compliant in data processing
- Access control based on consent
- Data sovereignty of vendor and incident response SLA.
Quick HRMS Features Checklist 2026
| Features | Why It Matters | Key Metric |
| Unified Employee Data | No silos, one-stop information repository | Reduces costs by ₹10 to ₹30 lakh per year |
| Intelligent Payroll Software | Auto-compliance, error-free processing | 80% faster payroll runs |
| EOR Integration | Supports global, cross-border hiring | Only 34% of HRMS platforms support this today |
| Recruitment & Onboarding Automation | Faster hiring, lower early attrition | Reduces time-to-hire by up to 30% |
| Continuous Performance Management | Replaces outdated appraisal cycles | 14% higher engagement reported |
| Leave, Attendance & Scheduling | Compliance + ops efficiency | Reduces leave-related disputes by ~60% |
| Global Mobility Management | Tax, immigration & assignment compliance | Prevents six-figure expat tax liabilities |
| Workforce Analytics & Predictive AI | Strategic decision-making for leadership | 2.3x higher business performance (McKinsey) |
| ESS Mobile App + Conversational AI | Employer brand, employee experience | 30–50% drop in HR transactional load |
| Security & DPDP Compliance | Legal protection, data integrity | Avg. breach cost: $4.7M (IBM, 2025) |
What This Means for Indian Businesses Specifically?
HR software technology in India is projected to reach $1.7 billion by 2027, growing at a 14.2% CAGR (NASSCOM, 2025). That growth is being driven by SMEs and mid-market companies finally graduating from legacy payroll tools and disconnected HR processes toward integrated, cloud-native platforms.
However, what is overlooked in the broader conversations is that Indian organisations have to navigate through a complex landscape of regulations. Your organisation will have to manage PF, ESI, PT (depending on which state you belong to), gratuity, TDS, the recently enacted DPDP act, labor laws applicable to your respective states, and, in the case of multinational firms, payroll in different countries along with EORs.
And this is precisely why choosing the right platform, one designed keeping in mind Indian regulations as well as having international ambitions, is an important consideration.
How TankhaPay Supports Modern Workforce Needs?
When you look at this checklist against the backdrop of India’s workforce, like its sheer diversity, the complexity of state-wise compliance, and the massive base of contractual, gig, and blue-collar workers who are still largely underserved by mainstream HRMS platforms, one platform stands out for addressing this gap thoughtfully.
TankhaPay is purpose-built for Indian businesses navigating the full spectrum of workforce management challenges. From automated statutory compliance (PF, ESI, TDS, PT) embedded directly into its payroll engine to digital onboarding designed for both white-collar and blue-collar employees, TankhaPay brings together the features on this checklist in a platform that doesn’t require an army of IT consultants to configure or maintain.
If your business operates on a contract-based workforce, the Contractor Management feature within TankhaPay will cover you right from attendance till compliance documentation, an area which all major HRMS solutions for enterprises continue to address only as a workaround solution. In the case of CHROs running growing organisations, it means being fully prepared for headcount numbers, attrition rates, and payroll costs. And for CFOs concerned about payroll accuracy and compliance risks without any surprises later on, the dedicated compliance engine from TankhaPay addresses those concerns completely.
As more companies turn towards an EOR approach for cross-state hiring as well as global mobility of key personnel, there is a need for a solution that scales with your ambitions but does not deviate from the rigours of Indian labor law compliance.
Final Thoughts
HRMS selection in 2026 is a long-term strategic investment. The ten capabilities outlined above in our HRMS selection checklist are not merely “nice-to-have” features; they represent the minimum threshold of what constitutes a modern, robust human resources technology platform. If you don’t meet this minimum threshold, you’re not only wasting opportunities; you’re increasing your organisation’s risks in terms of legal compliance, operational excellence, and talent management.
Before signing that new contract, before attending your next product demonstration, or before revisiting your next HR budget allocation, make sure you have this HRMS selection checklist on hand.
