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Celebrating over 20 years of our love for payroll.

Who created PaycheckCity?

Tom Reahard knows payroll. A self-professed “payroll geek,” he’s spent his entire career in the payroll industry. He wrote the first payroll system for the Macintosh and is the author of the Symmetry Tax Engine, which calculates the paychecks for over 100 million employees each year.

While building software tools for enterprise payroll platforms and Fortune 500 companies, Tom still had a heart for the little companies. The small businesses who embody the entrepreneurial spirit that Tom exhibited when he first set out to write a truly great software product. In May 1979, Tom walked into a ComputerLand store in Phoenix, Arizona as a recent college graduate and asked what type of software people were looking for. The associate told him, “they want to do payroll on the computer.” Three months later, Tom had a payroll product that he sold in plastic bags on consignment at ComputerLand. The rest is history.

Every year a million new businesses start up. Most will fail. But the next year, a million more will try. PaycheckCity Payroll is an ode to the small business founders who make up 99.9% of all United States businesses. Providing the same big-company accuracy for small businesses is a dream come true for the software founder from Indiana known to his closest friends and family as Tommy.

PaycheckCity creator Tom Reahard wrote the first payroll system for the Macintosh and is the author of the Symmetry Tax Engine, which calculates the paychecks for over 100 million employees each year.

History of PaycheckCity

  1. PaycheckCity logo 2000

    1995

    Symmetry Software, the parent company of PaycheckCity, launches in disk form Net Pay Plus, the original paycheck calculator.

  2. PaycheckCity logo 2002

    1996

    Symmetry Software makes freely available the tax resources behind its products on the website Payroll-Taxes.com. Payroll-Taxes becomes the number one organic search result for “payroll” and maintains this position for nearly a decade.

  3. PaycheckCity logo 2004

    2000

    Symmetry Software discontinues its Net Pay Plus calculator by putting it online for free at the website PaycheckCity.com.
    USA Today Hot Site names PaycheckCity a “Kim Komando ‘Kool Site.’”

  4. 2001

    Symmetry Software begins licensing private-label versions of PaycheckCity calculators to employers who want to provide a paycheck modeling tool to their employers.

  5. PaycheckCity logo 2009

    2010

    With the website that had given us so much, we wanted to give back so we launched “Calculators For Kids.” Whereby for every 100,000 visits to PaycheckCity, we gave a scientific graphing calculator to a kid in need.

  6. PaycheckCity logo 2011

    2012

    Upon customer request, we built a mobile app.
    Symmetry Software rebrands and begins exhibiting at American Payroll Association events as Symmetry. PaycheckCity remains a strong brand by itself on its own.

  7. PaycheckCity logo 2014

    2013

    We launched a new version of PaycheckCity focused on paycheck articles with a responsive design aimed to work on every browser. Traffic to PaycheckCity explodes.

  8. 2014

    Calculators For Kids expands to other states through the word of mouth of happy teachers and happy students. We give away our 1,000th calculator.
    Not enough people used the mobile app to justify the continued development, so we canned the mobile app.

  9. 2015

    PaycheckCity private-label calculators are rebuilt and rebranded as Calculators by Symmetry, completing PaycheckCity’s transformation to a stand-alone consumer brand.

  10. 2017

    PaycheckCity Payroll launches as the paycheck calculator plus. Longtime user requests such as building employee Payroll and saving calculations are fulfilled.

  11. 2018

    PaycheckCity Payroll makes its debut at the American Payroll Association Congress in National Harbor, MD.

  12. PaycheckCity logo 2020

    2020

    PaycheckCity relaunches with payroll tax content, paycheck calculators, payroll tools, and a full payroll offering.