What do I need to export before leaving Zoho People?

Work from two systems, not one. From Zoho People, the employee directory as your master index, leave balances with the policies that produced them, attendance and timesheet history, performance records, and the documents held against each profile. From Zoho Payroll, which is a separate product, the pay registers and payslips for every closed month and the statutory outputs you filed. Export custom form data as its own step, because much of what you built in Zoho People lives in forms rather than in a standard report. Do all of it while both subscriptions are live and paid.

Is payroll data in Zoho People or somewhere else?

Somewhere else, and this is the thing that catches teams out. Zoho publishes payroll as its own product, Zoho Payroll, available in the markets it supports. Your pay registers, payslips and statutory filings live there, not in Zoho People, so a clean export means logging into both and pulling each separately. If a payroll partner runs it for you through Zoho, ask them in writing for the full report set and the year-to-date position before you give notice.

Does Capstan replace Zoho People?

As a system of record, yes, and it does not assume you run the rest of Zoho. Capstan holds people, employment, leave, attendance, documents, workflows, self-service and reporting, with all fourteen modules on every plan including the free one. On payroll it works in partner-integration mode: it compiles the inputs, hands a documented export to your payroll partner, and files the computed results back onto each employee record, holding no statutory rate, slab or formula. If the value you are buying is HR inside one business suite, that is a different shape and you should weigh it honestly.

Leaving Zoho People: export checklist and switch

Leaving Zoho People is a two-system job wearing a one-system label. The HR records come out of Zoho People, but your payroll history and statutory filings live in Zoho Payroll, a separate product, and the data you built the hardest sits in custom forms rather than in standard reports. Pull both systems while both subscriptions are live, treat the forms as their own export, and the move is calm. Miss the second system and you discover the gap in the first month you need a payslip.

One note on sourcing. What follows about Zoho’s own products is our reading of their public help material, read in September 2026, and gathered through search because direct access to their help sites is blocked from where this was written. Their help centre is the authority, screens move between releases, and you should confirm the current article before planning a week of work around a menu path. Everything else here is about your obligations and your data, which do not move when a vendor ships a redesign.

What you are actually moving

An HR product inside a suite spreads your records across more places than a standalone one, so list them deliberately before you start:

The directory. Who works here, in what capacity, on what terms, from which location and legal entity. This is your master index and everything else is checked back against it.
Leave and attendance. Current balances, the accrual policies that produced them, and the attendance or timesheet history you are obliged to keep or want to carry.
Performance records. Reviews, goals and appraisal history, which are rarely a single clean export in any product.
Documents. Offer letters, contracts, identity and education papers, policy acknowledgements, anything uploaded to a profile.
Custom form data. The fields, workflows and records you configured yourself. On a highly configurable HR product this is often the largest and least portable pile.
Payroll output, from Zoho Payroll. Pay registers and payslips for every closed month, held in the separate payroll product.
Statutory output, from Zoho Payroll. The returns you actually filed, with their challans and acknowledgements, and the year-end forms for each completed year.
The year-to-date position, per person. The running totals that carry through your tax year. This is rarely a single named report, and it is the one that costs money if you leave it behind.

The export checklist, in order

Do all of this while both the Zoho People and the Zoho Payroll subscriptions are active and paid. Access to reports is a function of your subscription in every product, and a former customer is a lower support priority everywhere.

Directory first. Export the full employee list with every column you can select, including custom fields, and keep it as your index.
Leave balances and policies. Export current balances, then write the accrual rules down in plain words. You will be re-entering both by hand somewhere, because no two systems model accrual identically.
Attendance and timesheets. Pull the history you are obliged to keep, filed by month, which is how anyone will ask for it later.
Performance history. Export reviews, goals and ratings as far back as you want to carry. Test the mechanism on one person before you size the job.
Custom form records. This is the step people skip. Anything you built as a custom form or workflow has to be exported on its own terms, and some of it may come out one record type at a time. Test it early and size the work from the answer, not the assumption.
Documents. Download from each profile and from any central document area. Test on one profile first; if files come out per person, your timeline is a function of headcount.
Into Zoho Payroll now. Pull the pay register and the payslips for every closed month, filed by month. Then take the statutory set you filed, each paired with its challan or acknowledgement. The return is only half the evidence.
The year-to-date pack, which you have to ask for. See below.

The pack nobody exports until it is too late

Whoever computes your payroll after the move has to continue the tax year, not restart it. Restarting it means mis-deducting tax for every person for the rest of the year and then correcting it under time pressure at year end.

Ask for one spreadsheet, one row per person, covering: the identifiers your jurisdiction keys payroll on, year-to-date gross broken out by component rather than as a single figure, each statutory deduction by head, tax deducted so far and the projected annual tax the last run was working to, the tax election each person made where that applies, declarations and accepted proofs, any previous-employer figures taken into account for mid-year joiners, and outstanding recoveries such as loans, advances or notice pay. Ask in those words, because a request for “our payroll data” gets you whatever is easiest to produce. Then reconcile the totals against your filed returns and your bank before you accept it.

Timing: the tax year decides, not your renewal date

The cheapest boundary is the start of your tax year, with everybody at zero year to date and the previous year closed end to end by the system that computed every month of it. The next best is immediately after a filing period has been reconciled. The window to avoid is your year-end run-in, when annual reconciliation and the year-end forms land at once and compete with the migration for the same weeks, while they carry a statutory deadline and the migration does not.

When a mid-year move is worth it anyway. Waiting is the default, not a rule. Move mid-year when the current arrangement is actually failing, when a corporate event forces it, or when a renewal would otherwise commit you to another full year. In each case the mid-year friction is the smaller number, and you should say out loud which number you are choosing.

The move that is cheaper mid-year than it looks

There is one structural way to take the sting out of a mid-year change, whichever vendor you choose next: the system that holds your records and the system that computes your payroll do not have to be the same system, and they do not have to change on the same day. Separate them, and you can move the record whenever it suits you while changing who computes at the tax-year boundary, because the year-to-date arithmetic stays put.

That separation is Capstan’s default rather than a workaround. Capstan compiles joiners and leavers, pay structures, leave, attendance and adjustments into a documented export for your payroll partner, and files the results the partner returns back onto each employee record. It holds no rate, slab, bracket, threshold or formula, computes no gross to net, and files nothing with any authority. The payroll module sets out exactly what crosses the line in each direction, and why payroll should be a partner is the reasoning in full.

Where it tends to be hard

Payroll is in a different product, so plan two exports. The single most common mistake leaving Zoho People is treating it as one system and discovering the payroll history was never pulled. Diarise Zoho Payroll as its own project.

Custom configuration does not travel. The forms, fields and workflows you built are the part that made the product fit you, and they are the part least likely to export cleanly. Capture the records, and expect to rebuild the configuration in whatever you buy next.

Suite data is tempting to leave behind. If HR shared data with the rest of Zoho, be clear about what was HR’s record and what belonged to another app, and take a clean copy of anything that is genuinely an employment record.

Access ends on a schedule. Published terms generally give a limited window after termination to retrieve data before deletion. Read both subscriptions’ contracts for the real dates, diarise them, and finish well before the first one.

What you have to keep, whoever you buy from

Some of this is not a migration question at all. Employment and tax records carry retention obligations that follow the employer, not the software: payroll registers, the returns you filed and their challans, the year-end forms issued to each person, and the registers your jurisdiction requires. The periods differ by statute and change, so confirm them with your accountant rather than with any vendor, including us. The practical consequence survives every switch: keep your own dated archive, outside any vendor, a folder per year sub-foldered by month. Records you hold are records nobody can revoke, suspend or reprice.

Standing up the replacement

Use the implementation checklist for the general order of work, and read this as the overlay. Validate the export before you touch anything: open the files, confirm the payslip count per month matches the headcount you paid, confirm the register totals tie to your bank. Then load the new system in parallel while the old one is live. With Capstan that means a spreadsheet import with a dry run that previews every row and fails bad rows individually; be clear-eyed that documents load per person, opening leave balances are entered as an adjustment with a reason, and effective-dated history is not imported, so your export stays your archive of it. What imports and what does not is written out in full. Set one company-wide go-live date, hand your payroll partner one past month of inputs and compare their output to the register you exported, then reconcile ten people by hand before you cancel anything.

Who should stay where they are

Be fair to the product you are leaving. If you run your whole business on Zoho, and HR sitting in the same suite under one login, sharing data with CRM, Books and the rest, is the value you are buying, staying is a reasonable answer and we would say so in your position. A standalone system of record with partner-integration payroll is a different shape. It suits teams who want a clean, portable record that does not depend on a wider suite, who already work with a payroll partner, or who expect to operate in more than one country. The Zoho People comparison sets the two published models side by side, including where Capstan is the wrong tool. Read how to read an HR pricing page before you compare totals, and get every candidate’s all-in number at your real headcount; Capstan’s figures are on one public pricing page.

Where to go next

Whatever you buy, start your shortlist with the export is the habit worth keeping: ask about the exit before you sign the entrance. If your move coincides with people leaving, the full and final settlement guide covers the exit calculation and who does which part, and the full and final settlement calculator totals a leaver’s settlement from the figures you enter.

Leaving Zoho People without losing the record