Modern payroll should be easy on payday and explainable long after it.
A worker asks why their check changed. A CPA needs the source of a tax number. A provider switch puts year-to-date balances at risk. An agency questions a period everyone thought was finished. Payroll becomes hardest when the answer is scattered across exports, tickets, screenshots, and overwritten records.
Runbook keeps an append-only record behind each approved payroll run: what was calculated, accrued, settled, filed, corrected, and preserved.
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.
New York measured a 10% exception rate for filers whose payroll ran through the largest payroll providers. For employers filing on their own, the rate was 5.7%.
NY Department of Financial Services, payroll service provider report, September 8, 2022Paychex 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, 2026The 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 4-2Figures reviewed September 2, 2026 against the cited primary sources. They describe the payroll industry, not Runbook results.
The record should make ordinary payroll easier and difficult payroll answerable.
Trace pay, tax, and deductions to the facts and cited rules that produced them.
Keep the settled run intact and record the late fact, recomputation, and resulting delta.
Connect payroll, liabilities, payments, filings, and corrections for a worker, CPA, or agency.
A questioned number becomes an explanation, a correction when needed, and a record another person can check.
Runbook assembles workers, hours, taxes, deductions, employer cost, and liabilities.
The operator opens an amount and sees its source facts, calculation, and rule snapshot.
If a fact arrived late, Runbook preserves the original and derives the exact change.
The approved run produces a sealed artifact a third party can check independently.
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.
Setup, inputs, review, approval, worker access, taxes, accounting, and support should feel like one service.
Questions, notices, returns, corrections, and amendments should open the affected facts and obligations—not start a hunt through exports.
Software and agents may prepare and explain work, but calculation, approval, external action, and outcome remain distinct and reviewable.
The record should survive a provider switch, dispute, audit, correction, and system change without rewriting what was approved.
Runbook is not yet a full-service payroll provider. It is building toward that operational breadth on a record designed so every material number can be explained, corrected, and independently verified.
See how a payroll record can explain a number, preserve a correction, and support an independent check.
Try the correctness sandbox