How BGA unified Luke Coutinho’s people function across Zoho People, Payroll & Recruit

THE CLIENT

Luke Coutinho Holistic Healing Systems

Luke Coutinho Holistic Healing Systems Private Limited (LCHHS) is a holistic health and wellness enterprise delivering integrative, lifestyle-based healing solutions for individuals and organisations globally. The company offers structured wellness programs, one-on-one consultations, and guided interventions across nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management, emotional health, and preventive care.

 

The business operates through a multidisciplinary ecosystem comprising clinical nutritionists, dieticians, lifestyle coaches, yoga and movement experts, emotional wellness counsellors, and medical professionals. Services are delivered primarily via digital platforms, enabling pan-India and global reach through online consultations, programs, workshops, and educational content. LCHHS also runs corporate wellness programs, leadership health talks, and employee well-being initiatives, positioning itself as a comprehensive lifestyle medicine and preventive healthcare platform rather than a conventional clinical practice.

 

LCHHS operates with a blended workforce of full-time employees, consultants, nutritionists across multiple seniority levels, and support staff, spread across remote and in-office working arrangements. Managing the full employee lifecycle, payroll, and hiring engine at this scale, across a workforce with varied contract structures and geographies, had become operationally heavy.

 

What Was Broken

LCHHS was running the people function across disconnected tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes. Onboarding, attendance, leave, appraisals, payroll, and hiring all lived in separate places with no system-level handshake between them. Employee data was being re-keyed across HR, payroll, and accounting. Nutritionist-specific tracking, including long leaves, maternity leaves, HN assignments, warnings, PIPs, and contract capacity, was not structured anywhere the leadership team could query in a single view.

On the payroll side, statutory compliance across PF, PT, LWF, ESI, and TDS was happening without a single system of record, and variable pay for consultants and nutritionists was being calculated manually each month outside any governed workflow. On hiring, CVs were landing across email, website, vendors, and job portals with no structured intake, no source tagging, and no time-to-hire visibility.

 

What BGA Delivered

BGA designed and implemented a unified people and payroll platform across Zoho People, Zoho Payroll, and Zoho Recruit, built specifically for the LCHHS operating model. The three systems work as one connected stack, with HR data feeding payroll, recruitment feeding HR, and finance receiving payroll journal entries without manual intervention. The work covered the full employee lifecycle from first CV received to final settlement processed.

 

• Organisation Setup and Role Architecture

We configured the full organisational identity in Zoho People, including legal entity, business locations, departments, designations, and a custom employee data schema built for LCHHS’s nutritionist-led operating model. Role-based access was layered across Admin, Manager, and Employee roles, with form-level permissions mapped to who sees what.

• End-to-End Employee Lifecycle Management

We structured the full lifecycle from pre-joining to exit. Pre-joining, onboarding, post-joining, orientation, training assignment on LMS, document management, and letter templates all run through configured workflows. Exit management covers resignation submission, approvals, clearance checklists, asset recovery, and FnF-ready data capture in a single flow.

• Leave and Attendance Configuration

We configured the full leave policy across nine leave types, including nutritionist-specific long leave and maternity leave automation. Attendance runs on a web-based check-in system with configured shift rules, lenient mode work hour calculation, and manager-level notifications for late check-ins, no check-ins, and early checkouts. Attendance regularisation runs through a structured approval flow.

• Nutritionist-Centric Data Model

We built the custom data architecture LCHHS needed for its nutritionist workforce. Current status tracking across Active, On Notice, Exited, Long Leave, and ML. Activity trail on designation changes, category progression, group manager assignment, HN assignment and transfer, warnings, PIP end dates, and training completion. This gave HR and leadership a single queryable view of the nutritionist team that did not exist before.

• Performance Management and PIP Framework

We configured half-yearly and yearly appraisal cycles with group-based review windows, KRA and competency frameworks, and a structured rating scale. A dedicated Performance Improvement Plan module was built with a separate goal category, per-employee PIP creation, and manager-driven goal setting for underperformers.

• Zoho Payroll Implementation

We implemented Zoho Payroll end-to-end, covering organisation setup, PAN and TAN configuration, TDS Circle and AO mapping, and full statutory compliance architecture across EPF, Professional Tax, Labour Welfare Fund, ESI, and Statutory Bonus. The payroll calendar was configured to match LCHHS’s actual operating rhythm, with the 1st as payment day for fixed components, variable upload on the 4th, and cycle closure on the 5th.

• Complex Salary Structure Design

We configured the salary architecture to handle LCHHS’s varied compensation models. Fixed earnings, statutory deductions, Voluntary Provident Fund, previous month adjustments, and voluntary donations through payroll under 80C and 80G. Variable incentive handling for scenarios where employees earn only fixed, only variable, or a combination in a given month. Separate bonus configuration for support staff. Consultant payroll through the contractor module with bank integration across ICICI, HSBC, Yes Bank, SBI, and Axis.

• Employee Self-Service Portal

We configured the ESS portal for IT declarations, Proof of Investment submission and approval, old-vs-new tax regime selection, payslip delivery over email and mobile, and Form 16 access. The POI workflow ensures only approved investments flow into final TDS computation.

• Zoho People to Payroll to Books Integration

We built the integration architecture so employee master data and LOP data sync from Zoho People into Zoho Payroll automatically, and payroll journal entries post into Zoho Books on every finalisation. Salary expenses, statutory liabilities, and salary payable hit the books without manual posting.

• Zoho Recruit Implementation for ATS

We deployed Zoho Recruit as the centralised ATS, with role-based access configured across ATS Admin, Recruiter, Hiring Manager, Panel Members, Payroll Team (read-only), and Vendors (restricted sourcing). Multi-source intake was built across internal referrals, company website, vendor partners, and a dedicated talent email ID with auto-ingest and subject-line mapping to job openings.

• Role-Specific Hiring Workflows

We configured two separate hiring pipelines. The Nutritionist pipeline runs a five-round process covering LMS-based assessment, case study evaluation, HR screening, Head Nutritionist interview, and final interview with Ops Head, Founder, and CEO. The Support Staff pipeline runs a three-round process. Each pipeline has its own feedback forms, approval panels, and stage gating.

• Post-Offer and Statutory Reporting

We configured offer management with standardised templates, single-level approval, and status tracking across sent, accepted, rejected, and lapsed. Post-offer data flows to the payroll team for joining. Statutory reporting across PF ECR, ESI monthly returns, PT monthly and annual statements, and LWF summary runs out of the system directly.

• Automation and Notification Framework

We built the automation layer across the full stack. Pre-joining alerts to reporting managers and candidates. Induction programme intimation two days before joining. On-joining email ID creation triggers. Long leave automation with 15-day and 7-day pre-completion notifications to HR and Ops. Birthday, anniversary, and exit communications. Exit reminders at 7 days and 3 days before last working day. Every workflow carries a notification, a trigger, and an owner.

 

 

BGA Approach

This was not a typical HRMS implementation. LCHHS is not a standard company with a standard workforce. It runs a specialised nutritionist-led delivery model, with multiple seniority levels, long leaves, maternity cycles, probation gates, contract capacity, and HN transfers that are unique to how the business operates. An off-the-shelf Zoho People setup would have covered the basics and missed the actual business.

BGA brought the right combination: deep functional expertise across HR, payroll, and statutory compliance, Chartered Accountant discipline on tax and payroll governance, and Zoho platform depth across People, Payroll, and Recruit. We understood that in a wellness business with a specialist workforce, the system has to model the business, not force the business to model around the system. Long leave automation, nutritionist activity trails, variable incentive scenarios, consultant payroll through contractor modules, and role-specific hiring pipelines all had to exist inside one connected platform, with clean integrations into Zoho Books for accounting.

The result: a people and payroll operating system that runs the full employee journey for LCHHS, from the first CV to the final settlement, with statutory compliance built in, nutritionist-specific data architecture at its core, and zero manual handoffs between HR, payroll, hiring, and finance.