Building national, full-service payroll

Payroll can be easy to run and hard to doubt.

Modern payroll should be easy on payday and explainable long after it.

Start with the ordinary payday: gather the hours and changes, understand the full cost, review what people will receive, and know what still needs attention. Runbook is being built to carry that same clear record through payments, tax work, accounting, and support.

When a worker asks why a check changed or a CPA needs the source of a number, the answer should stay connected to the payroll record.

Explore fictional payroll today. Live payroll processing, direct deposit, tax payments, and tax filing are not yet available. See current status.

Runbook proof sequence preview
QUESTIONED RUN Explainable
Employee asksWhy changed?
CPA asksWhich rule?
Agency asksWhat evidence?
Agent asksCan I verify?
Facts Rules Deltas Seal

The measured problem.

Payroll’s failures are not in the ordinary paycheck. They are in corrections, provider switches, year-to-date reconstruction, tax notices, and the inability of any party to prove what happened.

1 in 6

Payroll clients who leave the largest providers each year.

Paychex reports payroll client retention of 82% to 83% of its beginning client base for fiscal 2026. Roughly one client in six left.

Paychex Form 10-K, fiscal year ended May 31, 2026
4.46M

Employment-tax penalties the IRS assessed in one year.

The IRS assessed 4,457,891 employment-tax civil penalties in fiscal year 2025, including 1.2 million for federal tax deposits.

IRS Data Book 2025, Table 4-2

Figures reviewed September 2, 2026 against the cited primary sources. They describe the payroll industry, not Runbook results.

Three outcomes from one payroll record.

The record should make ordinary payroll easier and difficult payroll answerable.

01

Explain a number.

Trace pay, tax, and deductions to the facts and cited rules that produced them.

02

Correct without erasing.

Keep the settled run intact and record the late fact, recomputation, and resulting delta.

03

Answer with evidence.

Connect payroll, liabilities, payments, filings, and corrections for a worker, CPA, or agency.

The signature workflow.

A questioned number becomes an explanation, a correction when needed, and a record another person can check.

1

Prepare

Runbook assembles workers, hours, taxes, deductions, employer cost, and liabilities.

2

Question

The operator opens an amount and sees its source facts, calculation, and rule snapshot.

3

Correct

If a fact arrived late, Runbook preserves the original and derives the exact change.

4

Verify

The proof demo includes a sealed sample artifact a third party can check independently; approval alone is not proof of payment or filing.

The winning product standard.

Make ordinary payroll as easy as the best modern systems. Make disputed payroll more exact, reconstructable, and independently checkable than a report or support ticket.

1

Easy when routine

Setup, inputs, review, approval, worker access, taxes, accounting, and support should feel like one service.

2

Exact when exceptional

Questions, notices, returns, corrections, and amendments should open the affected facts and obligations—not start a hunt through exports.

3

Automated with authority

Software and agents may prepare and explain work, but calculation, approval, external action, and outcome remain distinct and reviewable.

4

Provable afterward

The record should survive a provider switch, dispute, audit, correction, and system change without rewriting what was approved.

The claim we can defend today.

Runbook is not yet a full-service payroll provider. We are building that national service around a connected payroll record. Today you can explore payroll review, statement previews, a simulated Close, and independently checkable proof using fictional data.

Payroll that shows its work.

Explore the ordinary payday, follow a number to its source, and see how the record supports the work afterward.

Open the interactive demo