This is a guide to the employee offer letter.

1. GUIDE TO THE
EMPLOYEE OFFER
LETTER
SV.CO Financial Documents Repository

2. The Guide to Employee Offer Letter
In this guide, we’ll tell you what the offer letter includes and explain
each of the sections so that you can easily understand the
document.
When a person works for someone else or company, he / she is
called an employee and the person / company he works for is
called employer.
Money paid to the employee is called salary or wages or income
(to the employee)
The offer letter is a legal contract between the employee and the
employer that spells out the various aspects of the employee’s
work details with the employer. It talks about the
 Position / designation that is being offered
 The location (s) where the employee will be working after
joining
 All intellectual property or work that the employee does
belongs to the company
The details of the compensation offered, this is usually called the
Cost to Company or CTC

3. Companies have various components in the CTC but a standard
CTC will include the employee fixed salary or gross salary, bonus,
gratuity, provident fund, and insurance. Stock / equity is also
offeredto employees inmany cases
The Cost to Company (CTC)
Let’s first define some of the various components of salary so that
you are clear -
 Salary – separate sectioncoming!
Performance Bonus
Bonus is the amount payable to the employee based on
performance objectives determined by the employee and the
employer.
The amount is mentioned in the offer letter but the actual
objectives are usually agreed after the employee joins the
organization.
Bonus is usually paid once a year, at the end of calendar year
(December 31) or financial year (March 31). Some companies pay
bonus at the anniversary of the employee joining date.
Gratuity
Gratuity is a legal requirement of the company to pay employee a
certain lump sum amount if they leave after 5 years of working with
the same company.

4. It is a retirement benefitand also called a defined benefit.
However, the company should also pay gratuity if the employee
passes away or is disabled due to an accident or any illness.
Gratuity is also payable when an employee retires; the current
retirement age in India is 60!
Currently gratuity payment is tax free up to a total of INR 10 lakhs.
Gratuity Calculation = Last Drawn Salary × 15/26 × No. of Years
The ratio 15/26 represents 15 days out of 26 working days in a
month
Offer letters will have a notice period based on the company policy
– this is the time the company and / or employee have to give
when they decide to close the employment.
This notice is usually 1 month but can range up to 3 months.
All offerletters will have confidentiality and other legal clauses.
This is because the employee is dealing with information,
products, software etc. that belong to the company so companies
will ask employees to agree that they will not tell persons outside
the company about these information, products or software.

5. We all know of many cases where people have copied, stolen or
leaked company information that hurts the company big time.
Hence a company will ask employees to sign and confirm that they
will do no such thing.
For e.g. Apple, Google and many companies have offer letters that
run into tons of pages, most of the letter relates to confidentiality
and related clauses!
Some clauses are explained for you below
Confidentiality and Non Disclosure – this can just mean not
discussing internal goings-on with co-workers. In most cases, it
refers to not sharing trade secrets and other company information
with competitors,the press or anyone outside of your company.
Non Solicitation – this means that the employee cannot request,
meet or ask a company's clients or customers, for his or her own
benefit or for the benefit of a competitor of the company, after
leaving the company. Usually this will be for a certain period
depending on the agreement between the employee and the
company.
Non Compete – this means that the employee cannot start a
competing business with the employer after leaving the company.
Usually this is also for a certain period depending on the
agreementbetween the employee and the company.

6. Intellectual Property (IP) – the easiest way to know this is that it’s
stuff that cannot be touched / felt, and is usually a creation of the
mind, such as a patent. This includes ideas, software, code that is
written by programmers,presentations,documents etc.
Almost all companies and products, including ecommerce,
software and mobile products have IP.
Most companies will mention that all IP created by the employee
while working for the company belongs to the company and not to
the employee.
For e.g. most musicians now have IP on their songs / music so
that no one can copy their stuff!
Indemnity – this simply means that there is a repayment if one
person suffers a loss because of what the other person did.
Companies will include this offer letters because they can
sometimes suffer losses because of employees who do things
against the interest of the company – like not following the clauses
above, or destroying company property, or leaking company
information.
Employees have done such things when they are upset about
leaving or upset about something that they don’t like in the
company.
This has becomecommonin offerletters over the last few years

7. We hope that this guide has helped you understand the offer letter
much more clearly.
Please feel free to provide feedback on what we can do to improve
the contents of this guide.