payroll-operations

payroll-operations is a skill for Claude Code from cbrock84/headcount. It costs 104 tokens per session (844 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to running payroll accurately and on schedule, from HR and time-system inputs through tax deductions, payments, corrections, and reconciliation with the general ledger. The general ledger is the accounting record where payroll costs are recorded.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design payroll calendars, manage approvals and cutoffs, check gross-to-net calculations, handle corrections, and reconcile payroll to accounting.
Why use it?
It reduces late or incorrect pay caused by missed cutoffs, conflicting system data, tax obligations, or unreconciled accounting entries. It also explains how to make the pay cycle traceable and repeatable.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the people plugin — 12 skills shipped together

About the project

headcount is an organization of independently installable Claude Code plugins, each grouping skills for a department such as finance, security, or demand generation. Claude Code users install the departments they need and invoke their skills for specialized work; the catalogue entries are skills and related agent tooling from that organization.

cbrock84/headcount · 1,247 stars · on GitHub · cbrock84.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cbrock84/headcount/payroll-operations
Any agent
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill payroll-operations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install people, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for payroll-operations

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/payroll-operations.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/payroll-operations)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/payroll-operations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/payroll-operations.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 104 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 844 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00104 $0.00844
Opus 5 $0.00052 $0.00422
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00169
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00084

Measured 2d ago against content hash 64033fcf8def, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

payroll-operations scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/people/skills/payroll-operations/SKILL.md · 76 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 76 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Payroll operations

Payroll is the process with the least tolerance for error and the least visibility until it breaks. Nobody notices it working; everybody notices a late or wrong payment, and trust recovers slowly.

Payroll tax registration, withholding and filing obligations vary by jurisdiction and change frequently. Get a qualified adviser or a provider who takes filing responsibility, and confirm where liability actually sits.

The calendar is the control

Work backwards from the pay date: funding date, approval, processing cutoff, time-entry deadline, change deadline. Publish it, and treat the change deadline as real — the alternative is a correction cycle running permanently alongside the pay cycle.

Bank holidays, month-end, and year-end all move cutoffs. A calendar that was right in January quietly stops being right, and the first sign is a late funding.

Know what feeds pay, and make the HRIS the source

Every input is a place errors enter: new hires and terminations, pay changes, hours from time systems, commissions and bonuses, expense reimbursements, benefit deductions, garnishments.

The failure that produces most wrong payments is two systems disagreeing about someone's status — a leaver still active in payroll, a pay change entered in one place. Identity, employment status, and pay data should originate in one system and flow outward. Where a feed is manual, it needs a reconciliation, not a reminder.

Gross to net, and what sits between

Gross pay, pre-tax deductions, taxable wages, withholding, post-tax deductions, net. Understanding the order matters because it determines what a change actually costs and why a raise produces a smaller increase than expected.

Employer cost is not gross pay. Employer taxes, benefit contributions, and mandated insurances sit on top, and a hiring plan built on salary alone understates cost materially.

Garnishments and support orders have legal priority and limits on how much can be taken. They are one of the few payroll items where getting it wrong exposes the employer directly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 76 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 76 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A 64033fcf8def

Subscribe to this mod's changes

payroll-operations is a skill published in the GitHub repository cbrock84/headcount (1,247 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 844 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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