Guide
Payroll bureau software for accountants: what changes
Updated
For an accountant or bureau the deciding number is not how many employees, it is how many employers. That is where the pricing steps.
HMRC rules its own tool out
gov.uk states that Basic PAYE Tools 'is not designed for agents or bookkeepers' (gov.uk). That is unusually direct for gov.uk and it settles the question: a practice running client payrolls should be looking at the paid-for table on HMRC's recognised list, not the free one.
The pricing shape is different
- Per employer, not per employee
- Moneysoft's Payroll Manager 20 at £95 a year excluding VAT covers one employer. Payroll Manager 100 at £190 removes the limit on the number of employers and allows up to 100 employees each. The step is the multi-company licence, not the headcount.
- Per payslip
- IRIS Staffology Payroll prices on RTI submissions in the billing period: £43 a month to 19 payslips, then £2.15 per payslip to 50, then quote only. Predictable when client sizes are stable, less so when they are not.
- Bureau tiers
- Primo Payroll publishes separate bureau pricing keyed to the number of employers you carry rather than the number of employees.
- Quote only
- BrightPay, widely used by UK bureaux, does not publish a figure: its pricing page routes to a quote calculator, and above 250 employees for one employer it asks you to contact them.
Prices in this guide were read on each supplier's own page on 15 August 2026 and are quoted, not estimated. Bureau pricing in particular is often negotiated, so treat a published figure as a ceiling.
What to test before you migrate a client book
- Batch working. Whether coding notices, submissions and payslip finalisation can be run across many clients at once, or client by client.
- Pension provider coverage. Your clients will not all use the same scheme. Moneysoft publishes output files for a long list of providers and a direct NEST link; others integrate with a named few.
- CIS. If any client is in construction, check whether subcontractor handling is in the same product or a separate one.
- Year-end and leavers. Note that Moneysoft's employee limits explicitly include leavers during the tax year, which catches out anyone sizing a licence on a headcount snapshot.
- Getting data out. Ask what an export looks like before you put a book in, not after.
Recognition still applies
Whatever you choose, confirm it appears in the paid-for table on gov.uk's recognised software list under the supplier's name. Recognition means the product can report PAYE online, and nothing more: HMRC states it cannot recommend one product over another.