Anyone who has worked alongside a payroll team knows where the day goes: queries. A customer emails about a starter, another rings about a pension change, a third replies to a months-old thread with something new entirely. Every query matters (payroll mistakes are personal), but when they arrive scattered across inboxes and phone calls, keeping track of them becomes a job in itself.
Working with a client in the payroll services space, we set out to fix that with a dedicated query hub: a single place where every query lives, whoever raised it and however it arrived.
What we built
The query hub gives payroll teams and their customers a shared, structured view of every open question:
- Customers can raise queries directly in their portal, attach files, and paste screenshots straight into the conversation. No more "see attached" emails with nothing attached.
- Payroll staff can search across current and historical queries, so the answer given six months ago is never lost. Old queries often solve new ones.
- Queries can be resolved with a clear outcome recorded against them, giving both sides an audit trail of what was asked and what was done.
- Conversations feel human: replies show who is responding, and customers are notified when there's movement on their query.
Designed around how payroll teams actually work
We didn't design the query hub in a vacuum. Its backlog was shaped by the people using it day to day, and it shows in the details: the distinction between a customer user, a payroll user and an owner-level view; the need to see queries alongside the payrolls they relate to; the reporting a manager needs to understand where the team's time is going.
That's also why the query hub doesn't stand alone. It sits inside the client's wider platform, next to their existing workflows and customer portals, so a query about a change can become a change, without re-keying anything.
Built with .NET on Azure, proven in production
The query hub was built with .NET and hosted on Microsoft Azure, and it shipped iteratively across multiple releases, tested round by round with real payroll teams. It continues to evolve: the customers' wish list feeds the roadmap directly.
If your team is drowning in a shared inbox and a workflow that lives in people's heads, this is exactly the kind of problem we like. Get in touch and we'll talk it through.