# Rachel Thorpe, Bookkeeper at Thorpe Accounting Services — read of Payroll AI, May 20 2026 > Nine years keeping books for small businesses across the Portland metro. Currently managing payroll for 11 clients on a mix of QuickBooks Payroll and Gusto. I do school drop-off at 7:45 AM and bill about 28 hours a week. ## How I got here Someone in a Facebook group I'm in for small-business bookkeepers posted "has anyone tried this yet?" with a link. No other context, no review, just the link. That's usually how I end up on pages like this. I had 12 minutes between client calls so I read the whole thing. ## What I clicked first The top section hit me right away because it actually named me: "FOR BOOKKEEPERS AND CPAS." That's not how most payroll tools open. They usually open on the business owner and I have to figure out where I fit. "Bookkeepers, stop chasing payroll compliance all month" is a real sentence about a real thing I do. I spend probably 3 hours a month just checking that my clients' state unemployment rates are current and that nobody missed a quarterly deposit deadline. So I kept reading. ## Where I paused The IRS notice response line: "Forward the notice to our team. We identify the cause, draft the response, and handle the correspondence." That stopped me. I have two clients right now with open IRS correspondence that I'm managing for them. It's not hard work but it's annoying, time-consuming work. If that's real and included in the $89 plan, it's worth a conversation. That's the kind of thing that sounds too good and usually comes with a page of asterisks. ## What I distrusted Three things. First, the testimonials. Marcus R., Dana L., Tom B. Full first name, last initial, industry, headcount. That format is exactly what you use when you want testimonials to look real but you don't want to commit to them being verifiable. I've seen this on every SaaS landing page for the last five years. Give me a last name, a Google review link, something. "Marcus R." from an HVAC company could be anyone, including the founder's neighbor. Second, the stat: "18 min Average Payroll AI run time, start to direct deposit." I don't know what that means. Start to direct deposit is like saying a flight from Portland to Chicago is 3 hours and 40 minutes. Maybe. Also maybe it's 6 hours with a delay. What's the variance? What does "start" mean -- the moment I click Approve, or from when I begin reviewing the run? That number is precise enough to feel credible but vague enough to be meaningless. Third, "Unlock the dossier · $5" near the top of the page. I have no idea what that is. A deeper product brief? A sales doc? It reads like a conversion experiment that someone forgot to explain. It made me trust the page slightly less, not because of what it is but because it's unexplained. ## What would convince me I want to see what happens when something goes wrong. The page is all about the smooth path -- "Review and approve in under five minutes," "You receive a confirmation email," "You add the name; the system handles the rest." That's fine. But my clients' payroll goes wrong constantly. Someone changes their W-4 mid-year. A contractor wants to get paid in a different bank account than last time. An employee was overpaid three periods ago and I need to claw it back. Show me one of those scenarios and how the tool handles it. Also: I want to know specifically what happens to the bookkeeper relationship. The page is addressed to bookkeepers but the product seems to be sold directly to business owners. If my client buys this, does my login still work? Am I an admin user? Can I pull reports in a format I can use for reconciliation? The page doesn't answer any of that, and it matters a lot. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. When the IRS notice response is included in the Growth plan, is that handled by a person or is it a template response system? Specifically: have you resolved an actual CP2000 or 941 penalty abatement for a client, and can you show me one? 2. If a business owner is already using you directly, what access does their bookkeeper get? Is there a separate accountant portal or am I just another user on the account? 3. The stat "18 min average payroll run time, start to direct deposit" -- what does the standard deviation look like on that, and does it include any manual review steps or only fully automated runs? ## Verdict: on-the-fence The page communicates the problem clearly and the pricing is not insulting. But I need to know this works for an edge case before I'd recommend it to a single client, and nothing on this page shows me an edge case. I might email them. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-20. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*