Payroll Tax Deposit & Liability Tracker
Import each payroll run's tax totals, let AI accrue the liabilities and build a deposit calendar to the right due dates, get reminders before every deadline, reconcile deposit confirmations to liabilities by tax type, and approve the quarterly-return figures before you file.
A web tool where you import each run's payroll-tax totals; AI accrues the liability by tax type, builds the deposit calendar to your monthly or semiweekly schedule, and reminds you before each due date. You log deposit confirmations, the tool reconciles them to the liabilities, flags any underpaid or late deposits, and on approval exports a deposit log plus the quarterly-return figures you file from.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A payroll-register tax export per run and your deposit confirmations (CSV is fine)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every payroll run quietly creates a liability: the income tax you withheld, both halves of Social Security and Medicare, plus unemployment. None of it is your money — you're holding it for the taxing authorities, and you owe it on a deposit schedule that the IRS assigned you (monthly or semiweekly), each tax type with its own due date. Miss a deadline, deposit a dollar short, or use the wrong schedule and the penalty is automatic — and it scales with how late you are.
So the payroll accountant lives in a spreadsheet: copy the tax totals off each register, add them to a running tab, figure out the next due date by hand, remember to make the deposit, then at quarter-end try to reconcile what you actually deposited back to what you owed — by tax type — so the quarterly return ties out. It's a lot of manual arithmetic on high-stakes numbers, and the failure modes are silent until a notice arrives in the mail.
This is exactly the kind of deadline-driven, rules-based tracking that a small internal tool does far better than a spreadsheet — and you don't need to be a developer to build it.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool for payroll-tax compliance. After each payroll run you import the register's tax totals. The tool accrues the liability by tax type and adds the run to the deposit calendar built to your deposit schedule — monthly or semiweekly — with the correct due date for each obligation. Resend emails you a reminder before every deadline, so nothing sneaks up on you.
When you make a deposit, you log the confirmation. The tool reconciles deposits to liabilities by tax type, flags anything underpaid or late, and shows you the running balance owed. At quarter-end it pulls the figures your quarterly return needs. The accountant reviews the deposit schedule and the reconciliation, approves the deposit amounts and the quarterly totals, and only then does the tool export a clean deposit log and the quarterly-return figures you file from.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which payroll system you run, which deposit schedule the IRS assigned you, exactly which tax types and column names land on your register, your typical and peak pay-run frequency, your approval rules, and your nastiest edge cases (mid-quarter schedule changes, third-party sick pay, multi-state) — and then tailors the data model, the due-date rules, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around your payroll, not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the database schema, the per-run import with its duplicate guards, the liability-accrual and deposit-calendar engine, the deadline reminders, the deposit reconciliation by tax type, the accountant's review-and-approve gate, and the export of the deposit log and quarterly-return figures. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and clean CSV out, you can build and use it this weekend even with no direct connection to your payroll system.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This touches money you owe the government, so it's built like it matters: login so only your payroll team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own company's data, and a complete audit trail of every import, deposit, reconciliation, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing is treated as filed automatically: the deposit amounts and quarterly totals are drafts until the accountant approves them, and approval is the hard human-in-the-loop gate before anything is exported for filing. Duplicate guards on the run-plus-tax-type mean the same run can't be accrued twice and the same deposit can't be applied twice.
Who it's for
Payroll accountants and payroll managers who own payroll-tax compliance and want deposits scheduled to the right dates, reconciled by tax type, and the quarterly return to tie out the same way every quarter. If you can explain how your deposit schedule and due dates work, you can build this.
You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your payroll.