An outsourced payroll bureau running 6,500 payslips a month kept catching errors only after payday. We built an anomaly engine that diffs every draft against payroll history and flags outliers for review, so errors are caught before the bank file goes out.
Typical results
0
Errors reaching payday
6,500
Payslips screened monthly
5 min
Review per client run
85
Client companies covered
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
Across 85 client companies, staff spot-checked each payroll run by eye — about 40 minutes per client, and still roughly seven errors slipped through to payday every month: duplicated transfers, missing salaries, a decimal-point overpayment. Each miss meant clawbacks, an embarrassed client call, and around twelve hours of monthly correction work.
Before and after
Errors reaching payday (monthly)
−100%Review time per client run
−88%Correction hours per month
−100%The automation
We built a detection engine that intercepts every payroll draft the moment it's generated. Each payslip is diffed against that employee's prior months and the client's own patterns; sudden pay jumps, missing salaries, duplicate transfers and never-before-seen bank accounts are flagged with full context. Payroll staff review a short worklist of flagged lines instead of eyeballing thousands, and only a fully cleared run can be exported to the bank.
How it works
- 01
Draft lands
Each client's payroll draft is picked up the moment it's generated, before anyone reviews it.
- 02
Diffed against history
Every payslip is compared to that employee's prior months and the client's own patterns.
- 03
Outliers flagged
Sudden pay jumps, missing salaries, duplicate transfers and unfamiliar bank accounts surface with context attached.
- 04
Human reviews the shortlist
Payroll staff clear or fix a handful of flagged lines instead of eyeballing thousands.
- 05
File released
Only a fully cleared run is exported to the bank, with the audit log stored per client.
Starts from
- Payroll drafts
- Prior-month history
Delivers
- Flagged outliers
- Review worklist
- Cleared bank file
The impact
Anomalies are caught before payday, and errors reaching the bank typically fall from about seven a month to zero. Review time per client run drops from 40 minutes to five, twelve hours of monthly correction work disappears, and the screening can even be offered to clients as a premium feature.
Questions about this automation
What kinds of payroll errors does the anomaly check catch?
It compares each payslip with that employee's previous months and the client company's usual patterns. Typical flags are sudden pay jumps, a missing salary, a duplicate transfer, a decimal-point overpayment and a bank account that has never been used before. Each flag shows the old and new values, so the reviewer sees why it was raised.
Does the automation block the bank file until flags are cleared?
Yes. The export step only runs once every flagged line in a payroll run is marked as fixed or approved by a member of the payroll staff. Who cleared each line, when and with what note is written to an audit log stored per client company, which helps with later questions and audits.
Which payroll systems does it work with, and what is needed to start?
It reads payroll drafts from the payroll software through an API or a scheduled export file, and it needs a few months of past payroll history to set a baseline. Thresholds for what counts as unusual are agreed per client company. This is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages, starting with a few client companies.