Guide · Migration

How to switch from Zenscale Payroll without losing a month's wages or a single fingerprint

A payroll migration goes wrong in two predictable places: the exports nobody took before the old login stopped working, and the employee codes somebody renumbered so that four hundred workers had to queue at the terminal again. Both are avoidable in an afternoon. This guide is written for the administrator at a Punjab manufacturing unit moving attendance and salary off Zenscale's Payroll module, but the sequence is the same for any payroll product. It assumes nothing about why you are moving.

Get started Talk to sales

To switch from Zenscale Payroll, first export everything while you still have the login: the employee master with codes, monthly attendance and muster reports, salary structures, loan and advance balances, leave balances, and payslips and statutory reports for the years your accountant needs. Then register your biometric terminals with the new software by serial number and repoint them from their own settings menu; the fingerprints and faces stay on the device and keep working as long as the new employee records carry the same codes. Re-enter shift rules, week offs, holidays and late rules, decide where PF, ESI, TDS and piece wages will be computed from now on, and run one full pay cycle on both systems before you stop the old one. Plan on thirty days end to end, most of it the parallel month.

Export first

everything below, before any login lapses; the new register starts on cutover day

0 re-enrolment

keep the employee codes and the templates on the terminals keep matching

1 parallel cycle

run both systems for one pay period and reconcile to the punch

30 days

a realistic end-to-end timeline for a multi-plant unit

Week 1: take the exports, all of them, now

Whatever the reason for moving, the old system's data stops being yours the day the login stops working, and vendors do not always give notice. Export in the first week, before any settings change, and store the files somewhere two people can find. Zenscale's Payroll module lists an Employee Master, Muster Books, Payslips, Statutory Reports, Loan Management and Advance; every one of those is an export you want.

Employee master, with the employee code, department, plant, date of joining, designation, bank details and, critically, the biometric device code for each person. If the code is not in the export, read it off the terminal (Menu, User Mgt) before you do anything else.
Attendance and muster reports, month by month, for at least the current financial year and preferably the years your labour registers must cover. Ask your CA what to retain; the answer is usually several years.
Salary structures: basic, allowances, deductions, per-employee overrides, overtime settings, holiday and week-off eligibility. Screenshots are acceptable where there is no export; you will re-enter these by hand.
Loan and advance balances outstanding on the cutover date, per employee. These are the numbers most often lost in a migration and most often disputed afterwards.
Leave balances per employee and the leave types they belong to.
Payslips and statutory reports (PF, ESI, TDS, bonus, gratuity) as PDFs for every month you can reach. These are what an inspector or an ex-employee asks for two years later.
The user list and roles for the software itself, so you know who had access to what.

Week 1, same afternoon: the terminals are the easy part

The biometric machines at your gates do not belong to Zenscale and do not care what software reads them. An eSSL, ZKTeco or Realtime terminal holds every fingerprint and face against an employee code, and it will report to whichever server it is pointed at. Register each terminal's serial number in AionHRMS, then repoint it from Menu, Comm, ADMS or Cloud Server Setting. The full walkthrough is in the eSSL guide on this site.

Do not renumber anyone. If Zenscale's employee code 0417 is user ID 417 on the terminal, the AionHRMS record for that person carries 417. Templates keep matching, and nobody queues to re-enrol.
If Zenscale synchronised punches through software on a PC at the plant, that PC's job ends here. Leave it running until the parallel month reconciles, then switch it off.
Mixed brands across plants report into one AionHRMS account. Register every terminal at every plant in one sitting; the device-side change takes ten minutes each.
A terminal that will not repoint (no ADMS or server screen in its menu) cannot push and needs replacing. A fingerprint terminal that can is a few thousand rupees from a local dealer. Send us the model first; we say yes, test-first or no.

Week 2: map what moves, and decide where the rest goes

Not everything in a payroll module has a home in an attendance-first product, and pretending otherwise is how a migration fails in month two. Here is the honest map.

Moves to AionHRMS: employees and codes, plants and departments, shifts and duty times, week-off and holiday calendars, overtime and late rules, paid-leave quotas and balances, advances and loans with outstanding balances, the employee self-service login (phone OTP), payslips going forward.
Does not move, and needs a home: ESI computation and the filing of PF, ESI and TDS returns (PF and TDS deductions can be computed in AionHRMS once switched on); bonus, gratuity and ex gratia; piece-rate wages; arrears; statutory-format muster books; cost centres. Decide now whether these go to your CA, to a payroll product that files, or stay in Zenscale for a transition period. AionHRMS's monthly payroll report and partner API feed all three.
Geo-fenced mobile marking: both products support location-based attendance. AionHRMS requires an enabled company location, a linked employee account, a fresh location reading and an online server check. Test the actual workplace and devices before switching.
Enter the shift rules from your screenshots and check them against one real employee's last payslip. If the computed salary matches Zenscale's figure for that month, the rules are right; if not, the difference is almost always a grace period or a week-off setting.

Weeks 2 to 4: the parallel pay cycle

Run both systems for one complete pay period. It costs a month of the old subscription and saves the argument with the union, the accountant and the owner that a wrong first payroll starts.

Terminals push to AionHRMS from the day they are repointed. If Zenscale's sync at the plant still reads the terminals over the LAN, it continues receiving the same punches, so both registers fill for the same days.
At month end, compare the two attendance registers person by person, then the two salary figures. They should agree to the punch and to the rupee for everything AionHRMS computes. Differences point to a rule entered wrong, a code mismatch, or a terminal that was repointed late.
Have the CA run the statutory computation from the AionHRMS monthly report for the same month and compare with Zenscale's statutory reports. This is the handover of the piece that does not move.
Employees sign in to the portal during this month and check their own calendar and payslip. A worker who finds a missing punch in week two raises a correction request; a worker who finds it on payday raises a dispute.

Cutover, and what to keep from the old system

When the parallel month reconciles, stop the old subscription, switch off the sync PC if there was one, and keep the exports. Three things are worth keeping for years.

The exports from week one, in two places. Attendance history does not move into the new register; it is served from these files when someone asks.
The final Zenscale payslips and statutory reports, which close the last period under the old system and are what any later query about that period refers to.
A one-page note of the salary rules as entered in AionHRMS, signed off by whoever owns payroll. Most plants discover during a migration that the rules lived in one person's head.

If access ends sooner than planned

Sometimes a vendor's notice period is shorter than a month, or a renewal lapses before the exports are taken. The order of operations changes; the list does not.

Ask the vendor in writing for a full data export, naming the items in the week-one list. A written request creates a record even if the answer is slow.
Take screenshots and PDF prints of what the login still shows: employee master, current month's muster, salary structures, loan balances. A screenshot of a settings screen is a valid source for re-entering rules.
Repoint the terminals immediately so that no punch is lost from today onward; the parallel run becomes a reconciliation against the last month you can export instead.
The terminals hold the templates and the codes regardless of the software. Even with no export at all, the people and their enrolments survive on the devices, which is why the codes matter more than any other single item.

Frequently asked questions

Will our workers have to re-register their fingerprints after leaving Zenscale?

No, provided you keep the same employee codes. Fingerprints and faces are stored on the terminal against a user ID. Repointing the terminal to AionHRMS changes only where the punches go. Create each AionHRMS employee with the code the terminal already holds and every existing template keeps matching. Renumbering is the one thing that forces re-enrolment.

Does our attendance history move to AionHRMS?

No. History lives in Zenscale's database and is served from the exports you take in week one. The AionHRMS register starts on the day the terminals are repointed. Export monthly attendance and muster reports, payslips and statutory reports before any login lapses, and keep them in two places.

Where do PF, ESI and TDS get computed after we switch?

AionHRMS computes shift-wise salary and produces a monthly payroll report; it does not compute or file PF, ESI or TDS. Most units hand the report to their CA or to a payroll product that files. Decide this in week two and have the CA run one month in parallel from the AionHRMS report before the old system stops.

We pay piece rates for some workers. What happens to them?

AionHRMS does not compute piece-rate wages. Those workers still punch at the gate, and their attendance and shift record is in AionHRMS, but the per-piece calculation stays wherever you choose to keep it: the ERP, the accountant, or a spreadsheet fed by the AionHRMS attendance export. Say so on the plan so nobody assumes otherwise on payday.

How long does the whole switch take?

Plan on thirty days: an afternoon for exports and repointing the terminals, a few days to re-enter shift rules and loan balances, and one full pay period running both systems. A single plant with one terminal can be done inside a week; the parallel month is still worth running.

What does the switch cost?

Hardware: normally nothing, because eSSL, ZKTeco and Realtime terminals are reused. Software: AionHRMS is free up to 10 employees, ₹25,000 a year up to 100 and ₹50,000 up to 500, exclusive of GST, unlimited plants, invoiced only after the devices are live. There is no implementation fee. Your cost is one extra month of the old subscription for the parallel run.

Send us the employee export and the terminal models

We check the device codes, confirm every terminal, and stay on the phone for the first punch. Invoiced only after the devices are live.