Thinking of building an app that checks your payslip for mistakes - would this be useful?

[k282001]

A lot of people I know (including me) have had payslips that were wrong without realising – overtime rate slightly off, wrong tax code, missing hours, holiday pay paid at basic rate instead of average, etc.

I was thinking of making a simple app where you upload your payslip (PDF or photo) and it checks for:
– wrong overtime rate
– incorrect tax code
– NI issues
– pension % wrong
– missing hours
– holiday pay miscalculated

Basically a quick “is this payslip right?” checker that flags possible mistakes.

If this existed, would anyone actually use it?

And would people be willing to pay a small subscription for monthly checks, or would this only be useful as a free tool?

Honest thoughts appreciated – trying to see if it’s worth building or if people would think “nah, I can read it myself”.

So it's for people who are too stupid to work a calculator?

I work in the NHS and my pension is a nightmare. I would like a pension calculator to check my pension is right!

Your Detector isn’t very good!

There are so many tells. I am not saying it’s a bot - most likely it is indeed a real person posting. But they have used ChatGPT to write the posts. It’s becoming more prevalent now and as a PP says, it’s really off putting.

No.
It would just flag stuff up where do people go then? Chances are it would be garbage in, garbage out anyway.
I really don't think anyone would pay every month for it.

I tried three different ones. You can do it yourself too.

Autistic people can write in a way that makes people think chatGPT has been used, and mumsnet is full of people like you who accuse lots of posters of using it when they haven’t. Obviously OP might not be autistic but I always check text before accusing anyone, just in case.

Why do you think this is unique? Chat gpt and all the other consumer AI platforms already do this.

I agree. The idiots saying they don’t think it’s AI. OP is literally marketing a generative AI tool - of course AI is being used!

Why does someone always have to mention autism? On every unrelated thread?

It could be useful for free, but I would probably be too suspicious of it to enter any details.

I don’t need to try any of them, as I’m not in any doubt, thank you though! 😊

• The app extracts the numbers locally (nothing uploaded or stored) and It checks basic things like

Do hours × rate match the total I can't see a situation where they wouldn't get this right, unless possibly very small employers doing the calculation by hand, rather than using payroll software.

Is overtime calculated correctly How is it going to know how much overtime you were due to receive? Most mistakes happen because entitlement has been missed or incorrectly entered, not that a payroll programme has not been able to do simple arithmetic.

Has the pension % changed there are endless different pension schemes, how will the app know what it should be or whether it may have needed to change?

Do deductions stay consistent month-to-month People will know this, my pay and deductions stays the same within a few pence every month, I don't need an app to tell me this. Or for the people who's pay varies due to overtime, they will know that it varies.

Are there obvious NI or tax mismatches compared to what it should roughly be There are online salary calculators, also people's tax codes change for all manner of reasons, so how will it know what it should be? Also, what is the value of it saying 'roughly' what it should be?

Sorry but I cannot see the value of your proposed app above anything that is already available online and feel that it will be far more complex to build than you could imagine. Plus I can't imagine why many people would pay to use it.

Pointless

love to see this on dragons den they’d have there arse handed to them

I don't even download my payslips, never mind check them! The only app I need is the banking app to tell me the money has gone into my account.

I don't see the benefit. Once I make an effort to gather all the inputs, I can as well run the sums.

As an autistic person myself…we don’t tend to write like ChatGPT to the extent that there’s bizarre unnecessary punctuation at the end of a sentence:
No data leaves your phone at any point.”**
It’s a copied and pasted response written by AI, OP failed to completely delete the evidence.

People should learn how to read a payslip for themselves. It’s our money at the end of the day so we should understand what we’re getting and what we’re paying where

A few other things to consider -

What about salary sacrifice? It's on payslips now, private healthcare, dental care, gym memberships, company cars,
Company car tax
What about things like RSUs? Company share schemes
Capital gains tax

They are all potential variables that should be checked, but I don't know if an app would make it quicker.

Also, my payslip is on my work laptop, do I have to download it, email it to myself and then upload it into the app? That would be too much hassle. I could just check the figures myself...

Probably because they're also going to use ChatGPT to write the app

I can only echo what others have written. It is too simple an idea to be able to be of much use.

And for those that don't check their payslips, understand them or even look at them, please do. Noone will be as invested as you are in how much you're paid. I aaprove payroll in my company, there are many, many variables and the information going into the payroll system is only as good as what's been provided to your payroll team - your manager may not have communicated a rate increase/change in hours, the payroll clerk may have overlooked an unpaid leave day. I try to spend time educating the company on why it's really important to understand their payslip and check it.

I've also tried to tell my children this - my DD20 is getting there, but my DS18 didn't bother updating his casual work with his email address, so never even received a payslip 🙄.

I wouldn’t use it even if it were free. The software that my payroll team use can also perform those maths checks and having worked in audit they will also be running a month on month comparison check.
Errors I have experienced such as incorrect tax code or deductions need to be picked up with HR or HMRC. I don’t believe an app would realise my tax code should or shouldn’t have changed (which normally goes wrong on a new job for most people) or if I’ve had too much sick time deducted for example - I have to check my calendar for that.
sorry!

Or possibly, like me, the OP learned years ago to summarise info in bulleted lists with minimal extraneous information. I was taught to do that as a weeny, long before ChatGPT or even HTML was a twinkle in the eye outside of SF.

OP: I wouldn’t pay to use a service which was simply executing basic arithmetic. I can do that myself. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t trust it to be correct. Nor would I entire the amount of info needed for any app to do the arithmetic correctly into an app, paid or unpaid.

No one needs an app to do it - they can just do it with whatever AI app they are using on their phone or computer.

For those saying there is a market to include it in a payroll system - it is already (Workday, SuccessFactors, Oracle all have this in recent releases or on the AI roadmap)

Yeah, but presumably you didn’t learn to finish your posts with

.”**

as Op has done. Which is one of the classics “I copied this from ChatGPT” tells, together with …

—

I would use it now and again if I had unusual circumstances , like a change of tax code, backpay, new sal sac arrangement etc.
But I wouldn’t use it regularly enough to pay a subscription for it I’m afraid.

ChatGPT can do this for you already. It can do most things 🤷🏼‍♀️ not sure how you'd make any money on an app like that either. But if you're savvy with AI it wouldn't take much to get AI to build you the app and you could give it a go. Don't waste time coding it yourself.