As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly create payroll reports for your UK small business.

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 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your payroll software and export the current pay-period report as a spreadsheet, including employee names or payroll IDs, gross pay, deductions, PAYE, National Insurance, pension amounts, net pay and employer costs where available.
   2. Export the previous pay-period report and collect the related bank payment total, payroll journal and HMRC payroll figures for the same period.
   3. Remove unnecessary personal information, keep the payroll IDs and relevant figures, and check that the current and previous spreadsheets use the same column names and pay-period dates.
   4. Paste or upload the cleaned files to a spreadsheet-capable AI tool, then paste the supplied prompt and ask it to produce the report and reconciliation.
   5. Compare each report total with the payroll software export, payroll journal and bank payment total, and investigate every flagged difference or missing field.
   6. Ask your payroll accountant or other qualified payroll professional to check unusual payments, deductions, pension treatment and any correction before using the report for payroll decisions or HMRC work.

   Prompt

   Create a UK payroll report from the data I provide below. Use only the supplied figures and state clearly where data is missing or inconsistent. Do not invent employees, payments, tax treatment, rates or totals. Report the pay period and show separate totals for gross pay, employee deductions, PAYE, employee National Insurance, pension deductions, other deductions, net pay, employer National Insurance, employer pension contributions and total employer cost where those columns exist. Give one row per employee and a final reconciliation showing whether the employee totals add to the payroll total. Flag unusual negative values, duplicated employees, blank fields, unexplained changes from the previous period and any amount that cannot be reconciled. Do not decide whether a payment is taxable, whether a worker is an employee, or whether a pension contribution is legally required. Label every figure with its source column. Finish with a list of checks I must complete in my payroll software, payment records and HMRC records before relying on this report. This is not professional advice.
   
   Business: [BUSINESS NAME]
   Pay period: [PAY PERIOD]
   Payroll software or source: [SOURCE]
   Previous-period data, if available: [PASTE OR ATTACH DATA]
   Current payroll data: [PASTE OR ATTACH DATA]

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