As of 13 August 2026, AI can budget for UK payroll costs.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your current payroll report, payroll software or payroll bureau records and gather each employee's pay, pay frequency, hours, benefits, pension deductions, bonuses and planned changes.
   2. Open the relevant GOV.UK payroll and pension guidance for the tax year, then copy the applicable rates, thresholds and employer obligations into a notes document with their source links.
   3. List separate business costs such as employer National Insurance, employer pension contributions, payroll software or bureau fees, benefits, bonuses, recruitment and any levy that applies to your business.
   4. Paste the gathered figures and source rules into the prompt, replacing each bracketed section, and ask the chatbot to produce the budget and spreadsheet-ready tables.
   5. Paste the resulting tables into Excel or Google Sheets and check that each employee total, employer-cost total and monthly total recalculates from the underlying assumptions.
   6. Compare every tax, National Insurance, pension and levy assumption in the model with the GOV.UK guidance and your payroll system for the same tax year, correcting the model where they differ.
   7. Send the completed budget and its assumptions to your payroll provider, accountant or responsible finance colleague if any treatment remains unclear before using it for cash planning.

   Prompt

   Build a UK payroll cost budget for [business name] covering [tax year or budgeting period]. Use only the figures and rules I provide below. Do not invent tax rates, National Insurance rates, pension rules, allowances, thresholds or other payroll figures. If a required figure is missing, list it as missing and show where it belongs rather than estimating it.
   
   Employee data:
   [For each employee: name or identifier, annual salary or hourly rate, contracted hours, pay frequency, start or end date if relevant, bonus or commission assumptions, taxable benefits, salary sacrifice, pension contribution basis, and any other relevant pay detail.]
   
   Employer assumptions:
   [Employer National Insurance assumptions, pension contributions, apprenticeship levy assumptions if relevant, payroll software or bureau cost, benefits and insurance costs, expected pay rises, recruitment plans, and payment dates.]
   
   Rules and source figures supplied by me:
   [Paste the applicable GOV.UK or payroll-provider figures and links, including the tax year, thresholds, rates and pension assumptions.]
   
   Produce:
   1. A monthly budget for each employee and for the whole business.
   2. Separate employee gross pay, employer costs and total cash payroll cost.
   3. Separate recurring costs from bonuses, one-off payments and uncertain items.
   4. Monthly and annual totals, with the calculation for every total.
   5. A low, central and high scenario, changing only assumptions I identify.
   6. A list of missing inputs, ambiguous treatments and figures that need confirmation.
   7. A verification checklist showing which figures should be checked against GOV.UK, pension records and our payroll system.
   8. Spreadsheet-ready tables and formulas, with no rounding except where I explicitly request it.
   
   State clearly that this is a budgeting model, not a payroll submission or professional advice. Do not tell me to file anything or claim that the model proves the payroll is compliant.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.