Payroll Processing
The pay period closes Sunday night. By Monday this agent has pulled hours from every place they actually arrive, split the workweeks at the right boundary, run the over-40 math, drawn PTO against balances, and named every exception it could not resolve instead of guessing past it. What you get is a draft run with its work shown. It never submits, and it never moves money.
Yours outright — no required subscription.
Every agent is built for your business — your systems, your approval chain, your way of working. We scope it on the call.
If this sounds too technical, don't worry. We take care of everything for you.
- Private VPS deployment. This agent runs on a server that belongs to you, not a shared cloud tenant. Payroll data is about the most sensitive thing in your company, and nobody else's data touches your box.
- A technician agent alongside it. Every hire ships as a pair: the Payroll Processing Agent that reconciles the hours, and a VPS-technician agent that lives on the same box and keeps it healthy — patched, backed up, monitored. You're not hiring one thing, you're hiring a small team of two.
- Connection to wherever hours actually land. Clock exports, a shared hours sheet, photos of paper cards, PTO requests sitting in an inbox. It reads from the sources you already use, so nothing has to be forwarded to it by hand.
- Your pay rules, finally written down. Where the workweek splits, how overtime is owed per week rather than per period, which PTO counts toward the 40 and which doesn't, whose rate changes by job, what gets deducted and when. Scoping turns the rules living in one person's head into rules the run applies the same way every time.
- Security hardening. Private VPN, firewall, and encryption configured on your server before a single wage or withholding record touches it.
- A live walkthrough of both agents. We run a real period with you before it prepares one on its own, so you know exactly what it decides, what it flags, and where it stops.
- 14 days of priority support after launch. Your first two real runs are where the disagreements surface — the 15 minutes you never docked Dave, drive time paid on out-of-town but not local — and that's when it's worth having us on the line.
Not sure it fits? Check fit in 90 seconds in the free assessment chat.
Who this is for
- You run a 25-person contractor where hours come from a clock app for some crews and a texted photo of a handwritten card for others, and every hour has to be split by job — once to run payroll, and again to get labor onto the job.
- You're the office manager at a two-location clinic with 30 staff. Hygienists and front desk are hourly with shift differentials, per-diem fill-ins cover the call-offs, and payroll close lands on a Monday you're already booked solid.
- You bid public work, so certified payroll is due weekly per job with hours broken out by day and by classification — the same hours you already keyed once, retyped by the person who is also your estimator.
- You're the only person here who knows how payroll actually works — the exceptions, the drive-time rule, whose rate changed in May — and when you're out, payroll gets approximated by someone reading your spreadsheet.
How it earns trust
The failure mode of AI in payroll isn't that it gets an hour wrong — a tired person does that too. It's that you can't tell which line it got wrong, or why, until somebody's check is short. This agent makes the opposite bet: the draft has to tie out, and you check it without trusting the agent.
The run ties out to the minute
Total hours in the draft equal the sum of approved timesheet hours plus the exceptions it listed. Any difference is either a flagged exception or a bug — there is no third explanation. Exceptions are named and attributable: missing punch, no approval on file for this PTO day, no rate found for this classification, hours over policy.
Every line shows its work
Open an employee and you see the raw punches day by day, the workweek split at the boundary with the over-40 math visible, PTO drawn with the balance before and after, and every addition and deduction tied to the record it came from. If a rate was applied, the line names the rule that produced it. The raw timesheet stays exactly as it arrived, attached to the line it produced.
A variance view, and a diff you can run
Alongside the run sits a comparison against the last period: anyone whose gross moved materially, with the reason attached, so an extra digit in someone's hours is loud instead of buried in a 30-line register. After the fact, pull the submitted register from your payroll system and diff it against the draft. The difference is exactly the changes a human made — visible and listed.
None of that removes the judgment calls; it just means when something is wrong you find it in the draft, not in someone's check.
Pairs well with
These share a workflow with this role. Tick any to add them to your setup.
Payroll eats my entire Monday, every other week, forever. What actually comes off my plate?
The gathering and the arithmetic. It collects hours from each source, splits the two-week period at the workweek boundary so over-40 is calculated per week instead of per period, pulls PTO hours back out of the 40 where your policy says they don't count, and recalculates the regular rate when a bonus raises it. What stays yours is the deciding: reading the draft, answering the exceptions it names, and hitting submit. The Monday doesn't disappear — it stops being data entry and becomes a review.
Does it ever submit payroll or move money?
No. That's a hard line, not a setting. It never submits a run, never sends a direct deposit or tax payment, never prints a check. It never files or signs anything for you — not a 941, not W-2s or 1099s, and never the statement of compliance on a certified payroll form, since that signature is a personal legal certification and stays with the person whose name is on it. It never changes a rate, adds or terminates an employee, adjusts a PTO balance, or edits an original punch. Its authority ends at a draft register waiting on a named person to hit submit.
Somebody always forgets to clock out, and I'm the one texting the foreman about it.
You'll still send that text, but Monday morning instead of at 3:50 on submission day. A missing punch is missing data, not recoverable data: the agent can tell you on day one that there's no clock-out Tuesday for a specific person, but it cannot tell you whether he left at 3 or at 6, and it won't invent a number to close the gap. It also doesn't make your deadline move. If timesheets land twenty minutes before cutoff, the draft is late and the deposit slips a day. It surfaces the problem earlier, with a name on it. It doesn't solve it.
I'm not switching payroll systems. I just want the hours to arrive right.
You're not switching. It's built around the payroll system you already run and the approval chain you already have — it adds a step, it never removes one. The harder half of setup is never the system anyway, it's your pay rules: the per-job classifications, the accrual policy, the deductions that started mid-year. That's what gets scoped on the 15-minute call.
I'm the only person here who can run it. I haven't taken a real week off in three years.
The rules stop being undocumented, which is most of the reason nobody can cover you. Be ready for what that costs up front: the version of a rule you say out loud isn't always the version you've been running, and the first two or three runs will surface real disagreements someone has to decide. The agent applies the rule it was given; it doesn't settle which rule is right. It also stays silent on the calls that cost the most — whether a salaried coordinator is exempt, whether a long-term contractor should have been W-2, whether a remote hire created a state registration you lack.
What's covered under the $1,997 setup, and what isn't?
One company, one payroll system of record, one approval chain, at a flat $1,997 one-time setup. Typically live in about seven days from kickoff, with 14 days of support after delivery, and then we remove our own access. You own the server, the code, and the keys — we keep the playbook we used to build it. Multiple entities on genuinely different pay policies, or a second payroll system, is a scoped conversation on the call rather than a price adjustment.
Hiring more than one? A department on tap — the subscription puts a build team behind every request, agent after agent.