Is payroll included or sold as an add-on?
Payroll is the part of a business account that pays your people, sends the right figures to the tax authority and keeps the records you need afterwards. The first question to ask is plain: does the tool include payroll, or does it sell it as an extra? That single answer moves your total more than any feature list does.
Dinero, ANNA Money and TaxAssist Accountants Ireland all include payroll. With those tools the price you see is the price you pay for a full pay run, which suits a small business that wants one system instead of a bundle of subscriptions.
Billy and Freee Accounting both list payroll as an add-on. There the base subscription and the payroll module are billed separately, so add the two figures together before you set them beside an included plan. The Billy review is a good place to see how the add-on behaves once you are inside it.
The payroll software rankings let you sort the whole list by whether payroll sits inside the plan, so you can narrow the field before you read a single price.
Set your budget against the real market range
Prices across the tools we list run €0 to €330.74. That span is the fairest single number to start from, because it shows the cheap entry tier and the fuller setups at the expensive end. Judge each product against the whole span rather than against one headline.
ANNA Money advertises a free plan, and its starting price of £0 means you can look before you buy. Billy also offers a free plan, and its paid entry point is DKK 160, which is the figure to plan around once you outgrow the free tier.
Package prices sit apart from subscription prices. ANNA Money's company formation package starts at £19 and includes the state fee, so if you are setting up a company as well as paying staff, keep the two numbers in separate columns of your comparison.
Dinero and ANNA Money both list a free plan in their pricing models, and so does Billy. TaxAssist Accountants Ireland has no free plan, which is fair for a service that does the work for you, but it means you are choosing on service rather than on a trial.
Check the country and the local filing rules
Payroll rules are local, so the country a tool is built for matters more than almost any feature. ANNA Money is registered in GB, covers GB, and handles the local filing duties for MTD VAT and MTD ITSA. Company registration there runs a turnaround of 1 day.
Billy is registered in DK, which suits a Danish business, while Freee Accounting is registered in JP under the legal entity freee K.K. Founded in 2012, it is the newer accounting platform of this group and still treats payroll as an add-on.
ANNA Money has been building since 2017 and Aspire since 2018. Age is a weak signal, so weight it lightly and put your trust in the write-ups instead.
Treat support as part of reliability
Payroll deadlines do not move, so how you get help matters as much as what the software does. Billy offers support by email, chat and phone, the widest set of channels among the brands here, which helps if a pay run fails the evening before submission.
Dinero provides chat and a help centre. ANNA Money offers a help centre only, and TaxAssist Accountants Ireland offers phone support only. If you would rather speak to a person than read written answers, weight the phone channel most heavily.
Ask which channel you would actually open in a bad moment. A help centre suits a confident reader who can search, chat suits someone who wants a quick steer, and a phone line suits someone who wants the job handled for them. The Aspire review shows how a newer tool answers the same question.
Features that make pay day less painful
Bank feeds matter because they cut manual entry. Billy, Freee Accounting and ANNA Money all connect to bank feeds, so transaction data arrives in the account without anyone retyping it.
Mobile access is a real convenience when you are away from your desk. Billy and ANNA Money both publish iOS apps, so you can check a run or approve an item from your phone.
Dinero and ANNA Money both target small businesses, and Dinero also names beginners, which tells you it expects readers who have never run a pay cycle before. Billy, Aspire and TaxAssist Accountants Ireland also focus on small businesses.
Use a trial to run a practice pay run
Free trials across the tools run 7 to 30. That is enough time to import your staff list, run a parallel pay run and check the outputs against your current process before you commit to anything.
Treat the trial as a test rather than a browse. Check that your pay frequency appears, that the deductions you expect are present, and that the reports you must file come out in a form you can hand straight over.
Turn the shortlist into a decision
Score every tool in the same four columns: whether payroll is included, the price with any add-on added, the support channel you would use, and the country whose rules you pay under. The tool that fills all four cleanly is usually the one worth keeping.
Read the reviews for the brands still in contention, such as the ANNA Money review, and compare the write-ups side by side. If your business sits outside the markets covered above, wider options such as ifirma, Thankyou Payroll, NepalHRM and Facturama serve other payroll regimes.