How to choose HR and payroll software in Malaysia

Read this first. Malaysian payroll rules, rates and ceilings change. This guide names no rates on purpose, and it is not legal, tax or accounting advice. Confirm current rules with KWSP, PERKESO and LHDN, or with your accountant, before you rely on any figure from any source, including ours.

Start with your headcount and the jobs

There is no single best HR and payroll software. The right one depends on how many people you pay, what you need it to do, and who will use it every day. Before you compare anything, write down three things on one page.

1. Headcount. How many people you pay each month, and how many of them need to log in: staff who clock in, apply for leave or submit claims, not only the HR team. This number drives the price and the plan.
2. The jobs it must do. Payroll, attendance, leave, claims, onboarding documents such as offer letters and signed acknowledgements, and approvals. Mark which are needed from day one and which can wait.
3. What goes wrong today. Late payslips, a payroll spreadsheet that breaks when one person leaves, arguments about clock-in times, claims lost in chat.

That page is your test. Any product you try either helps with it or does not.

Statutory deductions, payslips and year-end forms

EPF, SOCSO, EIS and PCB are the lines where a payroll mistake costs the most, because they reach your staff's payslips and your payments to KWSP, PERKESO and LHDN. Good software works them out from the official tables, not from a percentage someone typed into a settings page.

There is a practical reason. EPF contributions are read from a schedule of wage bands, so a straight percentage of salary can come out slightly different from the schedule. SOCSO and EIS follow PERKESO's own tables, and EIS has a wage ceiling. PCB follows LHDN's computerised calculation and depends on the employee's marital status, children, reliefs and any bonus. A product that approximates these will look fine on a simple salary and drift on the awkward ones.

Questions to ask any vendor:

• Which table version, and from what effective date? A good answer names the source (the KWSP, PERKESO or LHDN publication) and the date it applies from.
• What happens when a rate or table changes? Who updates it, how quickly, and is there a visible record of what changed?
• Can you check it yourself? Enter the same employee in the product and in your current payroll, or in the official calculators, and compare every line.
• Does PCB handle the hard cases? Bonus months, mid-month joiners and leavers, unpaid leave, and different reliefs.
• Is the HRDF levy supported as an option? Ask whether it can be switched on or off, and confirm with your accountant whether it applies to your company.

Then look at what comes out. A payslip for every employee, a payroll summary you can reconcile against the amounts you pay to each body, and year-end EA Forms. Ask whether the forms are documents you submit yourself or ones the software submits for you, so there are no surprises at year end.

Rules differ by employer and by year. Confirm anything specific to your company with KWSP, PERKESO, LHDN or your accountant.

Attendance proof and privacy

If you want clock-ins you can rely on, ask what proof each clock-in leaves behind.

• Time only, time and location, or a selfie as well? The more proof, the fewer disputes, and the more personal data you are holding.
• A liveness check or face matching? A selfie with a blink check confirms a live person is in front of the camera. Face matching compares a face with a stored one. These are different things with different privacy consequences, so ask which one the product does and where the processing happens.
• How is location handled? A GPS radius around the office is common. Ask what happens for staff working from home or on a client site, and whether those clock-ins are flagged or blocked.
• Late minutes, schedules and automatic clock-out. These save HR the daily clean-up.

Photos and location are personal data. In Malaysia that brings in the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (PDPA). As the employer you decide what to collect, so tell staff what is collected and why, and ask the vendor how consent is recorded, who can see the selfies and locations, and how long they are kept. If in doubt, ask your legal adviser.

A mobile app for staff

If half your team is not at a desk, the phone is the product. Check that staff can clock in, apply for leave, submit claims and read payslips from the app, and that managers can approve from it too. Ask whether there are real iOS and Android apps or only a web page, how staff sign in, and whether the app can lock behind Face ID or a fingerprint. Then hand a phone to your least technical employee and watch.

Approvals and roles

HR work is mostly asking and deciding: leave, claims, overtime, equipment. Look for a single place where a manager sees everything waiting for them, and for a record that stays put once a request is decided.

• One inbox or many? Requests scattered across chat, email and paper are how things get lost.
• Who sees salaries? Roles such as admin, HR manager, finance and staff, with access set module by module, so a manager can approve leave without seeing payroll.
• A trail. An activity log of changes, so you can see who did what and when.
• Money goes somewhere. When a claim is approved, does it land in a payment queue for Finance, or does someone retype it?

Where your data lives and who can export it

Payroll data holds IC numbers, bank accounts and salaries. Before you load it into any system, ask:

• Where is it hosted? Which provider and which country. Hosting may be overseas, and that should be written down in the vendor's privacy notice, not discovered later.
• Who is responsible for what? Normally your company is in charge of its employee data and the vendor processes it on your instructions. The privacy notice should say so, and list the other companies it shares data with.
• Is each company kept apart? And inside your company, who can open or export salary and bank details?
• Sensitive records. Medical certificates, ID numbers and bank details deserve tighter access than a leave calendar.
• What happens in a breach? The notice should say how and when you would be told.

Read the price carefully

Compare what you would really pay for your headcount over a year, not the headline number.

• Per employee, per company, or per plan with a user limit? A per-employee price grows with every hire. A plan with a user limit is steady until you cross it. Also ask what counts as a user.
• What is included on every plan? Some vendors sell payroll, attendance or e-signature as extras. Ask for the full list on the plan you would buy.
• Trial. How long is it, is a card needed, and is it the full product or a cut-down one?
• Setup, migration and support. Are they free or charged, and how do you reach support?
• Billing terms. Monthly or yearly, what happens if a renewal is missed, and how you cancel.

Current HRWork prices are always on the pricing page, and we do not repeat them here so they cannot go out of date.

Check how you would leave

You may outgrow a product, or it may stop suiting you. Before you move in, check the way out.

• Export. Can you download payroll history, payslips and staff documents in a normal format whenever you want, without a support ticket?
• If you close the account. How long do you have to take your data, when is it deleted, and what is kept? Payroll records are something you may need to keep for a set period, so ask your accountant how long.
• Coming in. If you are moving from another system or from spreadsheets, will the vendor help bring over employee data, leave balances and payroll history, and is that free?

Where HRWork stands on the checklist

We make HRWork, so we are not neutral. Use the checklist above on every product, ours included, and judge the answers yourself. Here is what HRWork does for each line, based on what is on our own pages today.

• Headcount and the jobs. Payroll, attendance, leave, claims, documents with e-signature, offer letters and an approvals inbox are in one product, with one set of employee records.
• Statutory deductions. Payroll works out EPF from the Third Schedule, SOCSO including SKBBK, EIS with its wage ceiling and PCB from LHDN's computerised calculation, with an optional HRDF levy and per-employee opt-outs. Payslips, the payroll summary and EA Forms come out as PDFs. EA Forms are PDFs for you to use; we do not claim to submit anything to LHDN for you.
• Check it yourself, free. The same statutory engine runs the free HR and payroll calculators: salary and PCB, EPF, employer cost, overtime, leave entitlement and more. Each states the official source it follows and keeps an Update Notes list of changes. Compare them with your own payroll, and ask us the same table version and effective date question you ask everyone else.
• Attendance and privacy. Clock-in takes a selfie with a blink check and GPS confirms office clock-ins are inside your office radius, with office, WFH and outstation modes. It is a liveness check, not face matching: our Privacy Notice says the face and blink checks run on the device and that we do not store a face template. Consent under the PDPA 2010 is recorded on each employee record.
• Mobile. Staff clock in, apply for leave, claim and check payslips from the HRWork.my app, free on the App Store and Google Play, and managers approve from the same app. The app can lock behind Face ID or a fingerprint.
• Approvals and roles. Leave, claims, overtime, time off, equipment and payment vouchers arrive in one inbox, a decided request is locked, and approved money items go to Finance's payment queue. Roles and permissions are set module by module, and changes are recorded in an activity log.
• Data. Each company sees only its own records, and each person sees only what their role allows. The Privacy Notice names our hosting provider, says the servers are outside Malaysia, and lists the other providers we use. Your employer is in charge of employee data and we process it on its behalf.
• Price. Plans have a user limit rather than a charge per person, and every plan has every feature, web and mobile access, email and chat support, free setup and onboarding support, and free data migration. There is a 90-day free trial with full access and no card needed. See the pricing page.
• Leaving. You can download payroll reports, payslips and EA Forms, or ask us for an export, and there are 30 days after closing to ask. The steps are on the account deletion page. We help you migrate employee data, leave balances and payroll history in, for free.

A simple way to decide

Pick two or three products that pass the checklist, then run one real month in parallel in each, ideally alongside your current payroll.

1. Enter three real employees. A simple salary, one with allowances or overtime, and one with a bonus or unpaid leave.
2. Compare the payslip with your current payroll, line by line. Net pay should match to the sen, and so should each of EPF, SOCSO, EIS and PCB. Where they differ, find out which side followed the official table.
3. Let staff try the phone. Clock in, apply for leave, submit a claim, read a payslip.
4. Send one request through approval. Check the manager can decide it and Finance can see it.
5. Show the payslip and payroll summary to your accountant. Ask: "Can you reconcile our statutory payments from this?"
6. Try the exit. Export the payroll history and read it.

The product whose numbers match, that your team will actually use and that your accountant accepts is the right one, whatever the review sites say. With HRWork you can start the 90-day free trial, with every feature and no card, and run that month before you choose a plan.