Automating payroll admin: where the real gain sits

Automating payroll admin sounds like something for your bookkeeper. But the most expensive part of that process happens at your desk: the hours that come in late, the sick note passed on by app, the new employee whose passport is still sitting in somebody's inbox. Research among nearly a thousand Dutch payroll professionals shows that this is exactly the bottleneck growing fastest — and the only one growing at all. Below: where the time really leaks away, what you pay for it without seeing it, and which part you should and should not automate.

The bottleneck is not the processing, it is the delivery

Dutch payroll institute NIRPA has periodic research done among payroll professionals. In the 2025 edition (carried out by Berenschot and Performa, fieldwork March to May 2025, 998 respondents) 65% name the quality and timeliness of submitted changes as a bottleneck in the payroll tax return. Two years earlier that was 46%. The report states itself that the increase in bottlenecks is mainly caused by a sharp rise in the lack of quality and timeliness of submitted changes.

What makes that figure sharp is the direction of everything else. The share of professionals experiencing any bottleneck at all actually fell, by 12 points to 73%. So everything is getting a bit better except this one thing. The problem is not spreading, it is concentrating.

One honest note: this was measured among salaried payroll professionals, 51% of whom work at an accountancy firm and 21% at a bookkeeping practice. So it is mainly a statement about outsourced payroll. That is precisely why it matters to you: if you have outsourced your payroll administration, you are the submitting party in this research. That 65% is about how your paperwork arrives.

Around that bottleneck sit the other numbers from the same study: 62% saw workload rise over three years, 78% saw complexity rise, and the average payroll department shrank from 2.3 to 1.8 FTE. More complexity, worse delivery, fewer people. That is why your firm reacts differently now than it did three years ago.

What you pay for a payslip — and what is not included

In the Netherlands the price of processing is remarkably public. Payroll bureau To Count On publishes a volume scale on its rates page: 17 euros per payslip with one employee, 13.50 at 2 to 10, 11.75 at 11 to 20, 9.75 at 21 to 50 and 8.25 at 50 to 100 employees, plus 50 euros in fixed annual costs per company (tocounton.nl). Other providers land in the same range: 12.50 euros per payslip, 17.50 per employee per month, or 180 to 250 euros per employee per year (ak-hss.nl and fintravo.nl). Flynth puts it as a band on its services page: it varies roughly from five to forty-five euros per employee per month.

That price covers the payslip. About the work that precedes it, the same rates page says something else. Work on new employees, pension changes and submissions to insurers or occupational health services is charged on the basis of hours spent at the applicable rates, and where possible and on request you get a cost indication in advance. Three caveats in one sentence — and that is not unreasonable of the firm, because they cannot know in advance how often they will have to chase your paperwork either.

Do the sum with your own numbers

Before you automate anything, it is worth counting for one month. Not estimating — counting. Three numbers are enough:

• How many times a month does someone ask you or your team for a missing item? Hours, leave, an address, a copy of an ID document.
• How many minutes does it take to register one new employee, from the first form to the moment everything is in the system?
• How many corrections had to be run retroactively this year?

Then convert those hours at the right rate. Statistics Netherlands measures labour costs per hour actually worked: wages plus employer contributions, divided by the hours genuinely worked. For 2025 that averaged 47.60 euros, with sizeable differences by sector — business services 51.70, manufacturing 51.10, construction 45.30, transport and storage 44.40, trade 39.50 and hospitality 27.20 euros (CBS, De arbeidsmarkt in cijfers 2025). That is far above the average gross hourly wage of about 30 euros, and it is the figure you should be using.

Watch one thing in that conversion: a working person in the Netherlands averages 1,436 hours actually worked per year, not 2,080. Anyone converting saved hours into FTE should use the lower figure, or the promise does not hold.

What you can automate on your side of the line

Leave the calculating to your firm or your software. What is left is the delivery chain, and that is largely yours. Five things that genuinely matter there:

• One fixed route for changes. No app messages, no stray emails, no notes by the coffee machine. One entry point everyone knows, which automatically confirms receipt.
• A reminder that goes only to the stragglers. A blanket send-out on the 18th teaches your best contributor to ignore it. The version that works goes only to those who have submitted nothing yet, with the missing items listed in it.
• Hours that come from the system they are already in. If your engineers already write their hours on the work order, nobody should be retyping them into a sheet.
• Onboarding the employee fills in themselves. The new colleague is holding their passport; you are not. Let them complete the form and confirm it yourself in one go.
• A check before submission instead of a correction afterwards. Do the amounts add up, is the start date before the end date, is the ID document still valid on the contract date?

That last point delivers the most and is the least exciting. An error you catch before the filing costs a minute. The same error after the filing costs a correction, a new payslip, an unhappy employee and sometimes an additional assessment.

Two Dutch examples, with the caveat attached

At a Groningen firm of fifteen to twenty people that handles HR and payroll administration for more than four hundred companies, registering one new employee took 45 minutes on average: filling in forms, chasing information, emailing back and forth, and then retyping it all into the payroll system. They turned it around. The employee completes their own details and uploads their ID document, a model reads the data from it so the form fills itself, and the last step into the payroll package is a real connection rather than a person retyping. The employer checks and confirms in one go. According to the published case description, registration goes from 45 minutes to 2.

The second example is interesting mainly for what is not in it. Payroll and HR provider JAM! Horeca had seventy onboardings a day checked line by line against a written procedure manual: 4 minutes and 11 seconds per form on average, meaning almost five hours of checking a day before a single placement went through. Instead of a language model they deliberately chose about fifteen codified checks: the checksum on the citizen service number, the format and account holder of the bank details, minimum wage by age bracket, contract duration, and the validity of the ID document on the contract date. The reasoning is dry: such a check has exactly one right answer, must give the same verdict every time, and must be explainable to an auditor. Result according to the case page: from 4:11 to 1:52 per check, and roughly 55 hours of back-office time returned per month. Their process and compliance manager is quoted by name (whatsnext-ai.com). This too is a self-reported case page from the builder.

Two things stand out in both examples. The gain sits before the processing, not inside it. And in the second case there is no language model in the part doing the work: the gain came from codifying rules that used to live in a manual and therefore varied by reviewer. That is exactly the kind of automation nobody writes a press release about.

The AI that is probably already in your package

Before you buy anything new: ask your firm or software supplier what is already in there. NIRPA measures that too. In its sub-study on the influence of AI (published 31 March 2026, 670 respondents) 54% of payroll professionals use AI in payroll processing, against 29% a year earlier. Of those, 86% use a generative chatbot, 52% use AI features inside the payroll package itself and 17% use software that mimics fixed actions.

That middle figure is the important one for you. More than half of the people producing your payslips are using AI that was already in the package. So you are already paying for it. The question for your firm is not whether they work with AI, but which checks they now run automatically and which of your submissions fail them most often.

On the employee side something else is growing fast: one in five organisations now has an AI chatbot for standard salary questions from staff (that was 13% in 2025) and one in three plans to set one up. NIRPA director Ruud van Leeuwen sums it up: employees increasingly ask standard salary questions of a chatbot rather than a colleague.

Honestly: what automation does not solve

In the same NIRPA study, 69% of payroll professionals do not expect AI to lower their workload, while almost as many do expect the work to get easier. Belief in ease, then, not in capacity. That is a sober warning from the people doing the work: do not count on half an FTE freeing up. Count on making a deadline without the late evening, and on fewer corrections afterwards.

And there are situations where you simply should not do it. If you have six employees, a stable team and two changes a month, the counting itself is worth more than anything that follows. The return scales with how often something goes wrong, and with few changes little goes wrong. That is not a sales argument, but it is true.

• Do it if: lots of turnover, seasonal or on-call staff, multiple locations, hours that have to come from the field, or a firm chasing the same paperwork every month.
• Do not if: a small stable team with a handful of changes a year, or a process you are about to overhaul anyway because you are switching collective agreement or software.
• Do something else first if: there is no delivery route yet. Automating chaos produces faster chaos.

Where to start on Monday

You do not need a project for this. The first step costs you half a day, spread over four weeks.

• Put a tally mark down every time someone has to chase an item. Four weeks, nothing more.
• Ask your payroll firm what was billed hourly this year alongside the payslips. That number is on your invoices, just not on the quote.
• Pick one entry point for changes and communicate it clearly, once. This is free and often delivers half the gain.
• Write down the five checks that always go wrong. That list is the specification for whatever you may automate later.
• Only then decide whether to have something built. With the tally sheet and the invoice side by side, you will know within ten minutes whether it adds up.

And if those four weeks show it is not so bad after all? Then you have a good answer for the next salesperson who calls, and that is worth half a day too.