How we check your payslip, what we check against, and what you need to know.
Step 1: Read your document
You send us a photo of your payslip, umbrella statement, or CIS payment statement. Our software reads the document using optical character recognition (OCR) — the same technology your phone uses for scanning receipts. We look for key fields: who paid you, gross pay, deductions, net pay, and the pay period.
If we're confident we've read it correctly, we move to the check. If not, we ask you to double-check the fields we're uncertain about — you see the exact crop from your document next to each one.
Step 2: Check against HMRC rates
We check your gross pay, deductions, and tax against the statutory rates published by HMRC for the tax year you uploaded the payslip for. We look for:
- • Tax code: Is your tax code normal for your annual pay? Emergency codes and month-by-month coding can hide issues.
- • National Insurance: Have you paid the right amount? Agency workers and umbrella earners are often charged higher NI than PAYE.
- • Holiday pay: Are you being paid as you go, or is it held back? We flag when it's held and never refunded.
- • Umbrella deductions: Deduction % against your assignment rate, checked against your Key Information Document (KID) if you uploaded it.
- • CIS rate: Your declared CIS status and deduction percentage; if you're 20% deducted but your status shows 30%, we flag it.
- • Scheme status: Are you on a scheme (umbrella, self-employed, CIS) that you've told us about? Mismatches are red flags.
Step 3: What we find
If a field is outside normal ranges, we label it as one of:
- • "Looks right": No issues detected.
- • "£n looks missing": We've found money we think you should have. This is usually tax/NI or holiday pay you haven't received.
- • "Something's off": Something doesn't match the rules we check against, but we can't calculate an exact figure — you may want to check with your hirer.
- • "We can't be sure": We're not confident enough to say. We'll tell you what information would help (for example, your contract, your KID, or a payroll screenshot).
What we don't do
We are not a tax adviser, we don't verify anything with HMRC, your umbrella, or your agency, and we can't see your full employment contract or terms. We read a single payslip, not your whole employment picture.
If we say something looks wrong, we show you our working — but you should check with whoever paid you, your umbrella, or an adviser before taking action.
Accuracy and thresholds
Our checks are based on HMRC's published rates for the tax year of your payslip. We show you findings only when they're above a small threshold (to avoid flagging £1 rounding errors). Most findings mean money owed to you — sometimes tax due back from HMRC, sometimes pay you should chase your hirer for.
We test our rules against real payslips from members with a range of pay, trade, region, and scheme. You can see sample test cases and the working for each rule in our terms.
Anonymity and privacy
Your payslip is seen only by our software. If we need a person to look at it (for example, if the OCR can't read a field), a staff member reviews the crop you confirmed for that field — not the whole payslip.
We don't share your individual pay data with anyone: not your hirer, not other members, not our business partners. We aggregate pay figures across hundreds of payslips to show the "going rate" for your trade and region — but only when we have enough data, and only as a median figure with no individual data revealed.
Legal information
This is not legal or tax advice. Read our privacy policy and terms of service. If you think we've made a mistake, tell us using the "This is wrong" button on your verdict — we'll look at it and get back to you.