Data processing

Your company is the Data Fiduciary under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, and the controller under the UK and EU GDPR. You decide what is collected about your people and why.

Dignizant Technologies LLP is the Data Processor and processor. We handle that data on your instructions and for no purpose of our own.

This is required to be in writing: DPDP section 8(2) permits engaging a processor only under a valid contract, and GDPR Article 28(9) says the same. This page is that contract, and it forms part of the terms.

Subject matter and purpose: running your payroll — keeping an employee master, computing monthly pay and statutory deductions, producing bank files, payslips, registers and letters.

Duration: for as long as you have an account, and afterwards only for the period tax and wage law require payroll records to be kept.

Categories of people: your employees and former employees, and the people at your company who sign in.

Types of data: names and employee references; dates of joining, birth and leaving; designation and department; bank account, IFSC and account name; PAN, Aadhaar, UAN and ESIC numbers; contact details; gender, marital status and guardian; scans of identity documents; and the full record of what was paid and deducted each month.

We process your data only on your documented instructions, which are the settings you configure and the actions people at your company take in the product. We do not process it for our own purposes, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to train anything.

If we ever believed an instruction required us to break the law, we would tell you rather than carry it out quietly.

Access is limited to the people who need it to run and support the service, and they are bound to confidentiality that outlasts their involvement.

One company’s data cannot be reached from another’s: the database refuses it, rather than relying on every query to filter correctly. Scans of identity documents are encrypted where they are stored. Passwords are hashed, sessions can be revoked, and an authenticator code can be required. Traffic is encrypted in transit.

The honest limit, said here rather than discovered later: encryption at rest protects against a leaked backup or a stolen database, not against somebody who has the running application, which must be able to show a document to whoever is allowed to see it.

We use two sub-processors, and only two. Railway hosts the application and the database. Google delivers payslip emails, so a recipient’s name, address and payslip pass through it.

Each is bound to terms no weaker than these. We will tell you before adding or replacing one, and you may object; if we cannot resolve it, you may stop using the service and take your data with you.

When one of your employees asks what you hold about them, asks for it to be corrected, or asks to be forgotten, the product answers it directly: you can export everything held about your company, and erasure is a control on the employee’s own page that reports exactly what it removed and what it kept.

Where something falls outside what the product can do, ask us and we will help.

If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting your data, we will tell you without undue delay and in any event within 24 hours, with what we know: what happened, which categories of data and roughly how many people are affected, the likely consequences, and what we are doing about it.

Twenty-four hours rather than seventy-two, deliberately. Your own clock is the one that matters — the DPDP Rules require you to tell the Data Protection Board without delay and file a detailed report within 72 hours, and the GDPR gives you 72 hours to your supervisory authority. Both start when you become aware, so leaving you with an hour of it would be leaving you with our problem.

We will also help you with impact assessments and with consulting a regulator, so far as what we know is relevant.

At any time while you have an account you can download everything: your people, months, documents and accounts, as a file that opens without this software.

When you stop, tell us whether you want it returned or deleted. Either way, payroll records are kept for the period tax and wage law require even after an account closes, because destroying them would put you in breach of a different law; after that they are removed.

You can ask us for the information needed to show these obligations are being met, and we will answer. For an audit or inspection, ask and we will arrange it at a reasonable time; we will not charge you for a reasonable request.

Your data is stored on infrastructure in the region your deployment sits in, and the product is operated from India.

India permits transfers out of the country. Section 16 of the DPDP Act lets the Central Government restrict them to named countries, and as of today none has been named; if one ever is, and it affects you, we will tell you before anything moves.

If you are in the UK or EU and your data leaves it, that transfer relies on the UK Addendum and the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, which we will enter into with you on request and which take precedence over this page where they conflict.

hr@dignizant.com, and we answer within five working days. There is no separate address for data questions, because a dedicated one nobody watches is worse than the one we read.