Swiss payroll is one of the most regulated back-office processes in Europe: 26 cantons, source tax at municipal level, collective labour agreements, a 13th salary, and social insurance rules that change every January. Most companies handle it with software built decades ago — or hand it to an external provider and lose all visibility. With payrollnow, there is now a Swiss platform that does both, properly: run payroll yourself, or hand it over completely — on the same system, at a transparent price.
One platform, two models
payrollnow deliberately offers two ways of working, and companies choose how much they want to do themselves:
- Self-service: With the payroll software, companies run their own payroll for CHF 12 per employee per month. The system tells you exactly what to do — no payroll training, no course, no handbook required.
- Full service: With payroll outsourcing, a Swiss team of payroll specialists takes over the entire process for CHF 25 per payslip — from onboarding and monthly runs to salary certificates and communication with authorities.
Both models run on the same platform, so a company can start with the full service and take over later — or the other way around. Nothing has to be migrated twice.
Payroll in real time, not in monthly batches
Technically, payrollnow takes a different approach from classic Swiss payroll systems. Instead of a monthly batch run, the platform works event-based: every change — a new hire, a salary adjustment, an absence, a retroactive correction — is processed the moment it happens, and results are recalculated in real time. Retroactive corrections are applied instantly and remain fully documented and traceable.
For the companies using it, this means payroll stops being a once-a-month black box. Wage costs, deductions and employer contributions are visible at any time — not just after the run.
Built for Swiss compliance
The platform covers the full Swiss regulatory scope out of the box: all 26 cantons, source tax (Quellensteuer) at municipal level, collective labour agreements such as the L-GAV in hospitality, hourly wages, the 13th salary, and salary declarations via Swissdec ELM 5.1 through a partner. The software is available in four languages — German, French, Italian and English — and comes with an employee app for payslips and personal data.
Industry depth matters in Swiss payroll: for hospitality, payrollnow is part of a complete solution together with the Swiss hospitality platform PINIT — from scheduling and time tracking straight into payroll. For staffing and temporary work, the platform handles the specific requirements of personnel leasing.
Engineering behind it
ESGROUP is the engineering partner behind payrollnow. Our teams in Zurich and Krakow build and operate the platform — a modern, event-driven web application, developed and hosted in Switzerland, with the same engineering discipline we bring to our client projects: automated test suites, continuous deployment and security by design.
A current engineering focus is agentic automation. We are building AI agents into the platform that take over the repetitive parts of payroll operations: an onboarding agent that turns employee documents into complete, validated payroll data, and plausibility checks that review closed payroll periods automatically. The agents prepare — a person always confirms. Everything runs on Swiss infrastructure, and no customer data is used for model training.
For us, payrollnow is a showcase of what we believe good software should feel like in 2026: a complex, heavily regulated domain, made simple enough that a company without any payroll specialist can run it — because the system is the specialist.
Learn more
Visit www.payrollnow.ch to see the platform, compare the payroll software (CHF 12 per employee/month) and payroll outsourcing (CHF 25 per payslip), or book a first conversation directly on the site.
