Payroll manages the portion of accounting that is related to salaries, wages, and bonuses for employees. The software must be able to support the following set of functionality: payroll profile for the employees, benefits and deductions, eligibility controls, user’s balances, tax deductions, as well as payroll calculations, processing of payments, check printing, check distribution, tax documentation, security and auditing, and automated timesheets.

This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.