Why we do not run payroll, and are not going to soon.

The line

Bothy tracks time, turns it into project cost and client billing, and produces what each contractor is owed. It stops there. It does not file taxes, does not handle statutory deductions, and does not move funds. You keep paying staff through whatever you use now.

Why the line is there

Payroll is a compliance product. It is jurisdiction by jurisdiction, it changes every year, and getting it wrong costs the customer money and their reputation rather than costing them an afternoon. Doing it properly in even three countries is a company’s worth of work, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.

Money movement carries its own weight. A payments licence, safeguarding requirements and fraud handling all land on the price — and the price is the whole argument for Bothy. Thirty dollars for the bothy stops being thirty dollars the moment we are regulated.

What the customer actually asked for

When people say they want payroll in Bothy, what they usually want is the number. They want to know what each person is owed this month without rebuilding it from a spreadsheet, and they want the client invoice to reconcile against it. That part we do.

The remaining step — pushing that number into a bank or a payroll provider — is the part most teams already have solved. Adding it would duplicate their tooling and raise everyone’s bill.

What would change our mind

Customers asking for it repeatedly, in one or two jurisdictions we can do well, and being willing to pay separately for it. Not a feature-comparison table. The honest position today is that the roadmap has QuickBooks and contracts on it, and those are both closer to the work Bothy is already doing.