Custom payroll software for HR-tech startups, professional employer organizations, and global payroll platforms that have outgrown what Gusto, ADP, or Rippling can configure without compromise. When your pay rules, tax obligations, contractor mix, or HRIS integration landscape don't fit inside a SaaS platform's configuration layer, we build the system around your actual payroll product.
Payroll automation engines that calculate gross-to-net pay, apply your specific deduction rules, and close each run without a manual review queue
Multi-jurisdiction tax compliance with state, federal, and international filing logic built for your exact employee footprint
Expense submission, approval workflows, and reimbursement processing in one system connected to your payroll cycle
Contractor and 1099 payment workflows with automatic tax document generation and year-end filing support
Recognition
Running payroll across multiple states or countries and spending days each period reconciling tax rates, filing deadlines, and jurisdiction-specific deductions by hand?
Employees submitting expenses through email or spreadsheets, with approvals that take longer than the reimbursement itself?
Your payroll platform handles the standard cases but forces manual workarounds every time a contractor, part-timer, or multi-role employee appears on the run?
The short answer
RaftLabs builds custom payroll software for HR-tech startups, professional employer organizations, and global payroll platforms. We ship payroll automation engines, multi-jurisdiction tax compliance systems, contractor payment workflows, expense management tools, and HRIS integrations for businesses that have outgrown off-the-shelf payroll software. Most projects deliver in 10 to 16 weeks at a fixed, agreed cost.
Payroll software automates the calculation, compliance, and payment workflows that move compensation from the employer to the employee or contractor. Custom payroll software development means building those workflows around a specific business's pay rules, workforce structure, tax obligations, and integration landscape, rather than configuring a generic SaaS platform to approximate them.
01 Diagnosis
Multi-jurisdiction payroll closes late every period because tax logic lives in a spreadsheet
When your employee footprint spans multiple states or countries, each jurisdiction carries its own income tax rates, filing deadlines, wage bases, and year-end reporting requirements. Managing those rules in a spreadsheet means someone on your payroll team updates the file manually every time a rate changes, every time you hire in a new state, and every time a regulatory cycle closes. A single missed update creates a penalty. According to the American Payroll Association, payroll errors and non-compliance have cost U.S. companies more than $2.8 billion in IRS penalties, with 53% of companies penalized for payroll non-compliance within the last five years.A payroll engine with jurisdiction-specific tax logic built in calculates the correct withholdings automatically, flags exceptions before the run closes, and generates the filing reports each jurisdiction requires. The spreadsheet and the manual update cycle disappear.
Expense reimbursements run a separate manual process that takes longer than the payment itself
Employees submit receipts by email. Managers approve by replying to a chain. Someone on the finance team copies the amounts into the payroll system. The reimbursement either misses the current payroll run or gets processed as a separate bank transfer nobody can track. The process is slow, the data lives in four places, and the audit trail is a folder of forwarded emails.When expense submission, approval routing, and reimbursement processing run inside the same platform as payroll, the cycle compresses from days to hours. Receipts attach at submission. Approvals trigger automatically based on amount and category. Reimbursements post to the next payroll run or a scheduled off-cycle payment. Finance has one export to reconcile instead of four sources to collate.
Contractor payments require a separate manual process every period
Most payroll platforms treat contractors as an afterthought. W-2 employees run through the automated cycle. 1099 contractors get paid through a separate bank transfer, manually logged, and tracked in a spreadsheet until year-end when someone has to produce 1099-NEC forms for every contractor who crossed the $600 threshold. The bigger the contractor population, the worse the problem gets.A payroll system built to handle both employee and contractor payments within the same run eliminates the parallel process. Contractor payments calculate against agreed rates, apply the correct tax treatment, generate 1099-NEC documentation automatically, and post to your accounting system the same way employee payroll does. Year-end closes in hours rather than days.
HRIS data and payroll data live in separate systems that never quite agree
New hire starts on Monday. HR adds them to the HRIS on Tuesday. Payroll doesn't see the record until someone exports a CSV from the HRIS and imports it into the payroll system on Thursday. A field gets formatted differently in the two systems and the import fails. By Friday, the new hire is missing from the payroll run and someone has to process a manual off-cycle payment.That failure loop happens because the HRIS and the payroll system have no live connection. When those systems share a data model and sync in real time, new hire records, role changes, terminations, benefit elections, and time-off balances flow into payroll automatically. The manual export, reformat, and import cycle stops.
02 What we ship
We build gross-to-net payroll calculation engines that apply your specific pay rules: regular and overtime rates, shift differentials, bonus structures, garnishments, pre-tax benefit deductions, and post-tax deductions. The engine handles W-2 employees and 1099 contractors in the same run, applies jurisdiction-specific tax tables automatically, and produces a pre-close review screen before any payments process.
Pay rules that can't be expressed in a SaaS configuration layer are the primary reason businesses commission custom payroll development. We model your exact rules and test them against historical payroll data before go-live so the first live run doesn't surface surprises.
Built for HR-tech startups building a payroll product, PEOs running payroll for clients with non-standard workforce structures, and businesses replacing a manual payroll process that has outgrown a spreadsheet.
We build jurisdiction-specific tax engines that handle federal, state, and local income tax withholding for every state where you have employees, FICA and FUTA obligations, state unemployment insurance (SUTA) across multiple states, and international payroll tax obligations for employees in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and other markets. Tax tables update when rates change. Filing reports generate in the format each jurisdiction requires.
Year-end close covers W-2 production, state reconciliation filings, and 1099-NEC generation for contractors. Audit logs record every calculation so your tax team can reconstruct any pay period from the data in the system.
Built for companies with employees in 5+ states, global payroll platforms supporting international workforces, and PEOs responsible for tax compliance on behalf of their clients.
We build expense management platforms where employees submit receipts through a mobile app or web portal, approval workflows route to the correct manager based on amount, category, and cost centre, and reimbursements process through the payroll cycle or as scheduled off-cycle payments. Receipt capture uses OCR to extract merchant, amount, and date so employees don't type what a photo already shows. Mileage tracking calculates against current IRS or HMRC rates automatically.
Policy compliance rules flag out-of-policy submissions before they reach the approver rather than after the payment has already processed. Accounting integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and Sage post approved expenses to the correct GL account without a manual journal entry.
Built for businesses replacing an email-and-spreadsheet expense process, companies that want reimbursements visible inside the payroll system rather than managed separately, and finance teams that need a clean audit trail for expense claims.
We build contractor payment platforms that handle the full lifecycle: onboarding with W-9 or W-8BEN collection, payment calculation against agreed rates or milestone invoices, tax withholding where required, 1099-NEC and 1042-S generation at year-end, and payment disbursement via ACH, wire, or international transfer through Stripe or Wise.
For platforms with a large contractor population, we add self-service portals where contractors submit invoices, track payment status, and download their tax documents without contacting the finance team. For marketplaces and gig platforms, contractor payouts can trigger automatically from completion events in your product rather than requiring a manual payment run.
Built for businesses with more than 20 contractors on regular payment cycles, marketplaces and gig platforms paying workers at scale, and global payroll platforms supporting cross-border contractor payments.
We build payroll integrations with Workday, BambooHR, HiBob, Rippling, Gusto, ADP, Deputy, When I Work, and custom HRIS platforms so that employee records, role changes, terminations, benefit elections, and approved timesheets flow into payroll automatically. The integration removes the manual export, reformat, and import cycle that creates data mismatches between systems.
Where a direct API connection exists, data syncs in real time. Where it doesn't, we build a scheduled sync with validation rules that flag discrepancies before the payroll run rather than after. Change history logs every field-level update so your HR and payroll teams can see exactly what changed, when, and from which system.
Built for businesses replacing a manual CSV handoff between HRIS and payroll, companies that need payroll data to flow upstream into workforce analytics tools, and HR-tech platforms building a connected employee data layer.
We build multi-tenant payroll platforms for professional employer organizations and HR-tech businesses that run payroll on behalf of their clients. Each client gets an isolated data environment, configurable pay rules, and jurisdiction-specific tax logic that reflects their employee footprint rather than a shared average. The PEO's operations team manages all clients from a single admin console with bulk processing, cross-client reporting, and per-client audit trails.
White-label packaging means the platform carries your brand, not ours. API-first architecture lets you embed payroll processing into a broader HR or workforce management product without rebuilding the core payroll engine. We've built payroll infrastructure for platforms running payroll for hundreds of client businesses simultaneously.
Built for PEOs replacing a legacy payroll platform, HR-tech startups launching a payroll product, and benefits administrators who need to add payroll to their existing service offering.
03 How we work
Companies we've built for
04 Track record
06 Client voices
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.
USARaftLabs nailed what other agencies couldn't — they started with our business problem and worked backwards to the right product. We were live in 14 weeks.
07 Why us
The industry changes. The broken process usually looks the same. Across 14+ industries and 100+ products, we recognise your problem fast, and we frame the fix around your margin and your operations.
We measure success the way you do: hours saved, revenue earned, margin recovered. We stay through launch and growth, so the result is ours to own.
Vodafone, T-Mobile, Cisco, Energia, Aldi, Nike. Six years, 100+ products in production, 4.9 on Clutch. Serious businesses keep coming back because we stay accountable long after launch.
08 Questions
Off-the-shelf platforms work well for standard employee structures and single-jurisdiction payrolls. Custom becomes the right choice when your pay rules can't be expressed in the platform's configuration layer, when contractor and employee payments need to run through the same system with different tax treatment, when you're building a payroll product to sell to other businesses rather than using it internally, or when multi-country filing requirements exceed what your current provider covers. The trigger is usually a compliance gap, a manual workaround that runs every pay period, or a product vision the platform's API can't support.
Yes. We build payroll systems with jurisdiction-specific tax engines that handle state income tax, FICA, FUTA, SUTA, and international payroll obligations across the UK, Australia, Canada, and other markets. The tax logic is configured to your employee footprint and updates when rates or filing requirements change. Audit-ready reports and jurisdiction-level filings are included.
Yes. We build unified platforms where employees submit expenses through a mobile app or web portal, approvals route to the right manager automatically, and reimbursements process through the same payroll run or as a separate payment cycle. Receipt capture, mileage calculation, policy compliance checks, and accounting integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite are all capability areas we cover.
A focused payroll automation engine or expense management workflow typically delivers in 10 to 14 weeks. A full payroll platform covering multi-jurisdiction compliance, expense management, contractor payments, and HRIS integrations runs 14 to 20 weeks. Cost depends on scope and regulatory complexity: focused builds run $30,000 to $60,000, and full platforms are scoped separately. Fixed cost is agreed before development starts.
Yes. We integrate with Workday, BambooHR, HiBob, Rippling, QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, and time-tracking platforms like Deputy and When I Work. The integration approach depends on what APIs are available and whether data needs to flow in real time or in scheduled batches. We map the integration landscape during discovery and build the connectors that remove manual data transfer from your payroll process.
Tell us what you are building and we will scope it out together.