Built by a Certified Payroll Professional who’s caught these errors for 30 years.
PayrollDetective exists because the people processing your payroll have no incentive to tell you when it’s wrong.
Payroll errors are expensive, common, and invisible
Most employers don’t know their payroll has errors. Not because the errors are small. They’re often five or six figures per year. The systems they trust to calculate payroll are the same systems making the mistakes.
Payroll providers process transactions. They don’t audit them. They don’t flag when your overtime calculation is missing nondiscretionary bonuses. They don’t tell you when your SUTA rate is higher than it should be. They don’t catch FICA overcollection across multiple jobs.
These aren’t bugs. They’re structural blind spots, and they cost employers billions every year.
The Department of Labor recovered $1.3 billion in back wages in 2024. Over 70% of employers miscalculate overtime when nondiscretionary bonuses are in play. The average cost of a payroll compliance failure is 3× the original underpayment once penalties and interest are added.
We build adversarial tools
Every tool on this site is designed to find a specific error that payroll providers structurally cannot flag. Not because they’re bad at their jobs. Finding errors in their own output creates liability they don’t want.
We’re not a payroll provider. We don’t process your payroll, sell you software, or upsell you on services. We build free tools that check the math your provider should have checked but didn’t.
30 years in the payroll trenches
PayrollDetective is built by a Certified Payroll Professional who has spent 30 years processing payroll, handling compliance, and catching errors that cost employers thousands. Every tool encodes patterns seen across hundreds of real-world payroll situations.
No venture funding. No sales team. No client calls. Just tools that work.
Four commitments
Always free
Every core tool is free to use. No trial periods, no login walls, no feature gating. If it finds an error in your payroll, you shouldn’t have to pay to see it.
No login required
Enter your numbers, get your answer. Your payroll data stays on your screen. We never collect it, store it, or sell it.
No sales pitch
We don’t call you. We don’t send follow-up emails. We don’t upsell you on premium tiers. Use the tool, get your answer, leave.
Built for employers
Every payroll tool on the market is built for providers or is a provider. We build exclusively for employers and workers. That’s the structural difference.