About Runbook Payroll
Payroll is a promise. We keep it in writing.
Payday is the most important recurring promise a small business makes. When it goes right, it is an exhale. When it goes wrong, it is someone's rent. And when a tax agency asks questions — sometimes years later — the difference between a bad week and a bad year is whether you can prove what happened.
Most buyers do not ask for "provable payroll" in those words. They ask why a check changed, why a tax notice arrived, whether a CPA can verify the numbers, or whether a mid-year provider switch will break year-end. Runbook is built for that practical anxiety: when payroll goes wrong, show exactly what happened.
Runbook is being built as full-service payroll around a stricter record: each fact carries two dates, each amount keeps its source facts and rule snapshot, and each approved run can produce a sealed proof artifact. The goal is practical payroll with institutional-grade evidence, not a prettier dashboard over mutable numbers.
Our principles
- Show the work. Every user-visible number is a projection of engine lineage.
- Rules are content, not code. Tax parameters live in effective-dated snapshots with citations.
- Corrections are derived. The ledger is append-only; late facts create recomputed deltas, not patched history.
- No AI in the calculation path. Agents propose, humans approve, Runbook computes, Quittance proves.
- Payroll must become operationally complete. Live funds, filings, support, and notice workflows are product obligations, not footnotes.
The fourth generation
Runbook's founder grew up in the house of a CPA who wrote his own software. Between 1985 and 2004, Carl M. Heintz, CPA built payroll engines with tax tables stored as data, every pay category mapped to a ledger account, and the year-to-date beside every number. He taught taxation at UCLA and USC, spoke at seminars across the country, and shipped working software with the argument.
His son built Runbook without ever having seen that code. When the old files surfaced, the architecture matched. We think about that a lot. It suggests these are not features; they are what payroll looks like when an accountant who cares builds it honestly.
Where we are
Runbook is in active development, starting with employers and advisors who care about proof, corrections, local taxes, switching providers, and agent-mediated operations. The ambition is full payroll. The discipline is to build every public claim into the ledger before asking anyone to rely on it for payday.