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Payroll Times

Independent reporting on how accounting, payroll and tax software behaves and fails in production.

About Payroll Times

The accounting profession runs on software, and that software fails. Files corrupt. Migrations lose data. Versions reach end of support while firms are still filing on them. Services go down in the last week of a quarter. These events decide how thousands of practitioners spend their week, and they are covered thinly or not at all.

There is a structural reason for that. The established trade titles depend on the software vendors for access, event sponsorship and advertising. That relationship is not corrupt, but it does make sustained critical coverage of those same vendors commercially awkward. So the beat sits empty.

Payroll Times exists to cover it.

What we cover

  • Incidents. Outages, degraded service and defects in accounting, payroll and tax software, with the vendor status record and the times it was acknowledged.
  • Sunsets. End-of-support and discontinuation timelines, forced upgrades, and what stops working on which date.
  • Migrations. Version upgrades, platform moves and data conversions: what breaks in practice, and what it costs to find out late.
  • Regulation. Actions by the SEC, the PCAOB, the IRS, the GAO and the standards setters that change what practitioners have to do.
  • Analysis. Longer reads on how the software the profession runs on actually behaves, and why it fails the way it does.

What we are not

We are not a support site. We do not publish repair walkthroughs, error-code fixes or rebuild procedures. Plenty of sites do that well. We report what happened, when the vendor acknowledged it, and what it means for a firm mid-close.

How we work

Every factual claim traces to a named source with a date, and those sources are listed at the foot of each report. Our primary material is public record: vendor status pages and release notes, regulator and standards-setter publications, filings and court documents. Where something is unconfirmed we say so, or we leave it out.

The full set of rules we hold ourselves to - sourcing, corrections, what we will not publish - is written down at editorial standards.

The name

Payroll Times took over a domain that carried a payroll publication for years. We kept the name and widened the beat: payroll remains the single largest source of software failure in practice, but the reporting covers accounting and tax software as well.