Building Payroll with VCola
Goal
In April 2026 we set ourselves an ambitious goal: Let’s use VCola Studio to build an Irish Payroll system to pay ourselves by 25th May. I wanted to make sure that we could stand over the claim that VCola was designed to build real world enterprise applications - not prototypes. It was a simple mission: either we got it working by May 25th or no one would get paid!
There were a number of challenges wrapped up in making this happen
- In April we were rolling out a whole new suite of agents into the VCola Studio.
- When we started, VCola didn’t support any integration with external systems and for payroll we would need to integrate with the Irish online Revenue portal: ROS.
- We would also need to figure out how to support an application in production. In April we were still in the early stages of building out the full VCola production infrastructure, so the need to pay people by May 25th became a forcing function.
Prototype & Evolution
My initial scope was to focus on a very simple Irish payroll system and I somewhat foolishly jumped right into it and started getting Studio to build out a initial version. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that this would need to be a more sophisticated solution:
- It needed basic HCM staffing functionality - onboarding and offboarding. In particular, I wanted to build out a workflow where employees would enter and manage all their own personal data: TaxIDs, Bank Accounts, Date of Birth, Gender etc
- We also need to support multi-country out of the box. VCola has legal entities in both Ireland and the US and I wanted a single system to cater for both.
- Building out the multi-country support was a stretch for us: VCola comes with baseline entities for both “employee” and “legal entity” but our original entities did not have the sophistication to handle all the nuance I needed. This experience has sparked an idea for what we need to do longer term in the whole area of a “staffing model” - but that’s for another day.
- Lastly, I had a vague notion of the details involved in processing Irish Payroll. The last month has been a crash course in figuring out these details so I could get the product to the place I wanted.
Understanding the Workflow in Detail
In order to get up the learning curve, we had a local payroll expert come join us for a half day and walk us through the minutiae of Irish Payroll. The core workflow is complex enough but it has been added to in Jan 2026 by the rollout of the Irish “Auto Enrolment” National Pension. What we’ve ended up with is an 11 step process flow that looks like this:
Integration
Once we had a clear understanding of the flows, we then needed to implement them! This meant adding a whole new trick to the VCola Workflow: the ability to trigger an asynchronous call to a remote endpoint. The machinery allows the designer to specify the file formats (XML, JSON, CSV etc) as well as the underlying transport to use: SOAP, REST, FTP, etc. Using the machinery we were able to load up all the file formats and SOAP endpoints used by ROS and have our workflow trigger the async job to run.
This all sounds easy to do but it was a herculean effort! This stuff is not trivial.
Agentic Reporting
The beauty of building an application with VCola is that you get a powerful agentic layer out of the box. There is no report writer. Just ask the agent what you want and given its deep domain and application knowledge, it figures out how to answer your questions in a secure manner on top of the VCola core. After I ran the Pay Run I asked it to Export the May Pay Run in a journal format for an accounting system.
The VCola Console
During May we’ve also taken a step function in rebuilding our deployment infrastructure.
We’ve created a whole new starting point for every VCola customer: The Console. The Console allows our customers to create new products and then control how they are deployed onto various different confidence level environments: development, sandbox and production. As we evolve it, it will be the place to enable customers to control which user have what level of access to these different environments.
End Result
Amazing, this all came together and today we processed our first Irish Payroll.
It's a fairly significant achievement for our team. We’ve had a non payroll expert build and deploy a fully functional system that could pay people (and electronically file that payment with ROS) in a month. That month included building several huge pieces of VCola product capability! Not bad for our first production app!
Now, onto the next idea!
