Introducing PayAdjust: payroll that shows employees the full picture

PayAdjust is UK payroll software for small businesses — and as of this year, it's live. It calculates PAYE, National Insurance, and pension contributions, generates payslips, files RTI submissions directly with HMRC, and gives every employee their own login. This post is about why we built another payroll product when the market already has plenty of them.

Payroll software treats payday as the finish line

Run payroll with most tools and the workflow ends when the payments go out. Employees find out what changed when the payslip lands — after the money has moved, after the FPS has gone to HMRC, and after the window to fix anything has closed. If something looks wrong, the correction happens next month. If an employee wants to understand their payslip, the question lands on whoever runs payroll.

The pattern we kept seeing in small businesses: the person running payroll is also the founder, the office manager, or the finance team of one. They spend payday week answering the same questions — why did my tax go up? What happens if I raise my pension contribution? Where's my P60? — and the month after payday fixing mistakes nobody caught in time.

What we did differently

Payslips are previewed before payday, not discovered after it

In PayAdjust, generating payroll and finalising it are separate steps. You release payslips for preview, employees get notified to check their pay, and they can flag issues, submit expenses, or adjust their pension — all before you finalise and pay. Mistakes surface while they're still cheap to fix, before anything goes to HMRC or the bank.

Employees see the tax impact of decisions, live

When an employee moves their pension contribution slider, PayAdjust recalculates their PAYE, NI, and take-home pay instantly — using their real tax code and salary, not a generic calculator. They see exactly how much of a pension increase is offset by tax relief. In practice this means higher contribution rates and far fewer questions landing on HR.

An AI pension advisor that answers the questions HR shouldn't have to

Every employee gets a built-in assistant that explains pensions in plain English — salary sacrifice vs net pay arrangements, what different contribution levels mean over time, how tax relief works — personalised to their actual pay and current contributions.

The boring parts, done properly

None of the above matters if the fundamentals are shaky, so the engine underneath handles the full breadth of UK payroll: every tax code (including Scottish, Welsh, and emergency codes), all NI categories, student loan plans 1, 2, 4, 5, and Postgraduate, pension auto-enrolment assessments, statutory documents like P60s and P45s, BACS payment files, and FPS/EPS submissions filed directly with HMRC over the Government Gateway — no XML downloads, no Basic PAYE Tools.

Built for sensitive data from day one

Payroll data is about as sensitive as business data gets. NI numbers, bank details, dates of birth, and addresses are encrypted with AES-256-GCM at rest, every user must set up two-factor authentication, organisations are isolated with row-level security, and the primary database lives in the UK. There's more detail on our security page.

One plan, one price

£15/month includes 10 employees, then £2/month per additional employee. Annual billing saves 40%. Every feature is included — live tax modelling, the AI pension advisor, and payslip preview aren't locked behind a premium tier, because they're the point of the product. There's a 30-day free trial with full access, and no lock-in. Full details on the pricing page.

What's next

We'll use this blog for practical UK payroll guides — the questions employers actually search for, answered in plain English — alongside product news. If you run payroll for a UK business and any of the above sounds familiar, the trial is free for 30 days and takes minutes to set up.