47 questions, answered plainly

Payroll software for small businesses in the United States, built so that a first-time business owner can set up a company, add the people they pay, and understand every number without needing a payroll background.

It is pre-release. Set-up, your team, hours and approvals, reports and documents all work. Calculating real tax, filing it, and moving money do not — see “Can I actually run payroll with this yet?” below, which is the question most people mean when they ask this one.

No. You can do everything up to the point of paying somebody: set your company up, add your team, record and approve hours, and see what a period would pay with every number explained.

What you cannot do is have the right tax withheld, have it filed, or have money reach anybody. Those need a tax-data provider under contract and a money-movement partner, and until they exist the product refuses to approve a pay run rather than letting you believe one went out.

To get your company and your team set up properly, to keep hours and approvals in one place, and to see whether the way this product explains itself is the way you want to be told about your payroll.

If you need to pay somebody this month, use something that can. We would rather say that than have you find out later.

Around forty minutes for most companies, spread over as many sittings as you like — every step saves as you go.

Four questions at the start change what you are asked. Saying this is your first payroll removes a fifteen-minute step about prior wages entirely, because it does not apply to you.

Your legal business name and address, your entity type, your federal employer identification number, and the name of whoever signs for the company.

For each person: their name, email, job title, start date, how they are paid and how much. You do not need their Social Security number or bank details to get started.

Each step tells you what it needs before you open it, so you can stop before you get stuck rather than halfway through.

Yes. There is a demo company — Northstar Studio — with twelve invented people, a pay schedule, hours in several states of approval, and documents. It is built by running the real set-up steps rather than by writing rows into a database, so it cannot show you a state a real company could not reach.

Every name, address, figure and email address in it is fictional. Email addresses are on the .example domain, which exists precisely so that it cannot reach anybody.

Company set-up, your team with their pay history, importing people from a file, hours and approvals, reports and CSV export, document storage, roles and permissions, and your own account settings.

Every area of the product has a page saying what works in it and what does not. Nothing is marked working that is not.

Real tax calculation, tax filing, moving money, benefits administration, a portal for the people you pay, paystubs, time off, scheduling, and posting to your accounting system.

Each of those needs something other than more code — a contract, a licence, or a registration. The area pages say which.

That the number was produced by a placeholder rather than by a real tax provider. Gross pay is real arithmetic over your own hours and rates. Everything withheld comes from a stand-in that applies a flat 20% employee and 10% employer rate with no thresholds, no wage bases, no filing status and no state variation.

The rates are deliberately round and obviously wrong. A placeholder that looked plausible would be more dangerous, not kinder — somebody might file on it.

Anywhere a simulated figure appears, the screen says so. A pay run cannot be approved while any of it is simulated, and that refusal is in the code rather than in the interface.

Because the alternative is a list that grows quietly and a customer who finds out after switching that a tick meant “eventually”.

Every capability is marked as working today, being built, or planned, and nothing marked planned is charged for. An area is only marked as fully working when every capability in it is — one unbuilt row among nine finished ones makes the whole area “partly”.

Nobody, through this product, today. We are not a registered reporting agent in any jurisdiction and we do not remit anything.

If you are paying people now, your existing provider or your accountant is doing this and must keep doing it. Nothing here changes that, and nothing here should be taken as evidence that it has been done.

Because it is a data problem, not a maths problem. Correct withholding needs current federal, state and local rules for every place each person lives and works, kept current as they change mid-year, applied against their filing status and their year-to-date wages against every threshold and wage base.

That is a product companies build and maintain and sell. Writing our own version would mean being confidently wrong at a scale where the penalty lands on you.

Gross pay. Hours multiplied by a rate, or an annual salary divided across the number of periods in a year. That has no legal content, it is the same in every jurisdiction, and getting it wrong would be a bug rather than a violation.

The division is done so the periods add back up to exactly the salary. $65,000 does not go evenly into 26 fortnights, and rounding down every period would quietly underpay somebody a few cents a year, every year.

Because the alternative is paying them nothing and not telling you. An hourly worker whose timesheet is not approved is the commonest reason a payroll goes out wrong, and a payslip for zero looks entirely valid until payday, when it is found by the person who was not paid.

Approve their hours, or deliberately leave them out. Either is fine; doing neither silently is not.

We will not tell you, and you should be wary of any software that does. Worker classification is a legal determination with tests that differ between federal law and individual states, and getting it wrong carries back taxes, penalties and interest.

Ask an employment lawyer or your accountant. The product records the classification you give it and never infers one from a job title — including during a bulk import, where a row with no classification is flagged for you to answer rather than defaulted either way.

No. Overtime rules are jurisdictional — the threshold, the multiplier and what counts toward it all vary — so this belongs with the tax provider rather than with us.

What the product does record is whether each person is exempt or non-exempt, per person, because that is a fact about them rather than about your company.

Not produced. They come from a full year of real pay runs, which needs real tax calculation and filing first.

This matters if you are thinking of switching mid-year: whoever paid somebody during the year owes the form for it.

It records where people live and work, and where you are registered. It does not decide what that means for withholding, because that is the tax provider’s job.

Multi-state payroll is one of the places where being approximately right is worst, so this is deliberately not attempted.

Prices are shown in your local currency because that is where you are and that is what you would be charged. Payroll itself runs for companies registered in the United States only — we do not file or remit anywhere else.

Everything that is not payroll works wherever you are: your team, their records, hours and approvals.

It is allowed — backdating a raise agreed in September to January is an ordinary thing to do — and it is never silent. The form warns you before you submit, and the result says back pay is owed.

Nothing calculates or pays the difference for you. That needs a pay run.

Download the template from People → Import, put your people in it, and upload it. Up to 500 at a time.

Nothing is written until you have seen what it would do. The first submit only reads the file and shows you every row, what it would create, and every reason it could not — with the line and the column named. The button that writes is not offered until there is nothing left to fix.

Nothing is imported. Not the good rows, not any of it.

A half-migrated company is much harder to unpick than a file that needs another pass, and “we did the good ones” is no kindness when you cannot tell which those were.

Not in one file — 500 at a time. The limit is about reviewability rather than technology: a file of three thousand is a file nobody checked, and the whole value of this import is that somebody sees what it will do first.

Split it by department or by start date. Six passes gives you six chances to notice a problem instead of one.

Because re-running February’s payroll in December has to produce February’s answer. A pay change closes the range that was in force and opens a new one beside it; it never edits the old number.

An overwritten rate silently rewrites history — every past payslip and every filed return that referenced it now disagrees with the record that supposedly produced them, and there is no way to tell from the data which is right.

Because six months from now somebody will ask why this number changed, and “somebody edited it” is not an answer a payroll record is allowed to give.

Making it optional would mean it is usually missing exactly when it matters.

Yes, and that is assumed rather than accommodated. Classification and pay type are per person, never per company.

The import template demonstrates all four arrangements on purpose, because assuming a company has one kind of worker is the commonest wrong assumption in payroll software.

Not yet. It is a reasonable ask at any size above a few dozen people and it is a larger piece of work than it looks: a sync that can create a worker can also deactivate one, and a deactivation that reaches payroll by accident stops somebody being paid.

Until it exists, the file import does the same job in one pass and shows you every row before writing anything. Tell us which system you use and we will know what to build first.

Anyone whose pay moves with the clock — hourly employees and contractors billing by the hour.

Salaried staff do not, because their pay does not depend on it. Showing them one would imply it does, which is both untrue and the kind of untrue that gets argued about.

No, and the refusal is in the domain rather than in the interface, so no screen can get around it.

A manager who is also paid hourly has a timesheet of their own, and signing it themselves removes the only check on it. It is the separation of duties every payroll audit looks for.

However you write them: 7.5, 7:30 or 7h 30m all work.

They are stored as whole minutes and only shown as decimal hours. 7.4 hours is not a number a computer holds exactly, and a week of them added in floating point does not equal the sum of its days — at an hourly rate, that difference is somebody’s pay.

The person is told why — a rejection without a reason is a task somebody has to guess at, which ends in changing hours until they are accepted.

When they correct it, the timesheet reopens so the approver knows to look again, rather than the fix sitting underneath a stale “rejected”.

Because payroll has taken them. A calculation whose inputs can change underneath it cannot be reproduced, and reproducing a figure you already paid is most of what makes payroll auditable.

A correction after that point goes through a pay run rather than through the timesheet.

Nothing is deleted. An entry you remove is marked as withdrawn, with your reason, and stays on the record.

A row that vanishes takes the question of who removed it with it.

You cannot yet, and nothing has ever charged you. Choosing a plan records the choice and the price as it stood that day, and no card is asked for.

When payment is wired up it will charge in the currency you were quoted, not the dollar equivalent.

They are provisional, and the page says so. Nothing marked planned or being built is charged for in any plan.

Each currency is its own list price rather than a conversion — the number shown is the number that would be charged, in the currency shown.

No. Nothing in this product moves money and nothing is configured that could.

Paying wages means moving other people’s money, which means money-transmitter licensing or a sponsoring bank. It is the heaviest requirement in payroll, and a screen that looked like it could send a payment and could not would be the most dangerous thing here.

Encrypted with a per-record key, bound to the record they belong to, so a value moved into a different row fails to open rather than decrypting into somebody else’s record.

The last four digits are a separate stored column, so a screen can show enough to recognise somebody without the full number ever being unsealed. Seeing even those four digits is its own permission, and it is not one a manager has.

A full Social Security number is never written to a log, and the demo company does not contain a single real one.

Not unless you give them that permission specifically. Seeing who works here and seeing what they cost are separate permissions held by different people.

Where somebody may not see pay, the pay is not fetched from the database at all — not fetched and hidden — so there is no figure to leak into a log or into the page sent to their browser.

Every query against company data goes through a wrapper that makes it impossible to write one without an organisation predicate. It is structural rather than a convention someone has to remember.

A record belonging to another company returns “not found” rather than “forbidden”, because a denial would confirm it exists.

Yes. People and hours export as CSV from Reports, and your own account data downloads as a file from your account page.

An export you cannot get is a lock-in rather than a feature.

Some things, and deliberately not others. Documents are archived rather than deleted, because an I-9 outlives the employment and a garnishment order outlives the debt. Time entries are withdrawn rather than removed. The audit trail cannot be deleted from at all — the application’s database role is not granted permission to.

Account deletion is not available from the interface yet, because payroll records have retention periods that outlast an account. Write to us and it will be done properly.

No. Nothing in this product uses AI to calculate tax or net pay, classify a worker, approve hours, submit payroll, move money or change bank details.

Those are decisions with consequences that land on a person, and they are made by rules you can read or by a human who is accountable.

Check spam first, then ask for a new link — the newest link is always the live one, and older ones stop working the moment you request another.

If the screen says we could not send it and that retrying will not help, the fault is ours rather than yours, and pressing the button again will not change it. The screen takes the button away in that case rather than inviting you to keep trying.

Either way, write to info@payrole.net and we will confirm your address by hand. Nothing about your account is blocked while your address is unconfirmed.

Yes, where it is configured, and you can connect or disconnect it from your account page.

Disconnecting is refused if it is your only way in. The usual advice — disconnect and reset your password — assumes you can still receive email at that address, which is exactly what fails for the person who most needs their account back.

Ten, with forty-nine permissions between them: company owner, payroll administrator, HR administrator, manager, accountant, auditor, employee, contractor, and two support roles.

The distinctions are the ones payroll needs. Seeing who works here, seeing what they are paid, seeing their Social Security number and seeing where their pay is sent are four different permissions.

Yes. One account, as many companies as you belong to, switched from the menu under your picture.

Your picture, your theme and how you sign in belong to you and travel between them. A company’s logo, brand and payroll set-up stay with the company.

Write to info@payrole.net. There is no support team yet — support worth having means somebody who knows payroll rather than somebody reading a script, and that is a hiring question.

We are not able to give tax or legal advice, and will say so rather than guess.