WorkFlow Wednesday: When a Vendor Failure Wrecks Payday for Thousands of Small Businesses – The MyPayrollHR Collapse

A cautionary tale for every business leader

In September 2019, thousands of small businesses across the U.S. woke up to a nightmare. It was payroll day. Instead of eques, employees saw their bank accounts drained or balances pushed deep into the red.

The culprit? MyPayrollHR, a payroll provider that abruptly collapsed after its CEO admitted to bank fraud. Employers scrambled to cover wages out of pocket (some paying staff twice - great for the staff, maybe less-great for the boss!) while unauthorized withdrawals cratered cash flow.

The real cost wasn’t just money. It was broken trust with the people who make businesses run; imagine how deeply disruptive it would be to your context if all of a sudden your people weren't getting paid? We know that if you are looking at our website, you are focused on more than the bottom line - the Authentik way is that people matter, and a payroll collapse means that your people can't pay their rent, buy their groceries, or pay their bills. This isn't just a disruption to your business; it's a disruption to the people who make your business work, and any decent leader cares about those people and doesn't want this to happen. To be clear: MyPayrollHR was not our client. But their collapse shows exactly why mapping processes and planning contingencies matter.

What went wrong?

The MyPayrollHR disaster highlights three critical vulnerabilities that every organization should be thinking about:

• Vendor reliance without a plan. Businesses had no backup for the most critical cycle they run: Payroll. If they had mapped out their processes, then maybe this reliance would have been noticed and some redundancy put in place, but leaders assumed that MyPayrollHR would have their backs - and they were right, until they didn't.

• No documented off-boarding steps. When the vendor failed, employers didn’t know how to pivot quickly to a secondary provider; their own internal needs not being well mapped meant that recreating the necessary functions was impossible.

This wasn’t just bad luck (though "getting caught engaging in bank fraud" is probably considered bad luck by the executive in question!). it was the result of fragile processes that no one had mapped, tested, or backed up.

How WorkFlow could have made a difference

At Authentik Consulting, we built WorkFlow to prevent exactly this kind of disruption - our goal is to help disruption-proof your leadership, and that often means ensuring that the brass tacks are taken care of so that when disruption hits, you are prepared to pivot and keep going.

WorkFlow captures the real steps your team takes while doing their work—without extra meetings or lost productivity. It uses three simple capture modes:

1. Voice mode – staff narrate as they go.

2. Document mode – upload existing policies or forms.

3. Q&A mode – guided prompts to fill in the blanks.

From there, WorkFlow generates a clear, printable process manual and map. Leaders can see the end-to-end payroll workflow: time capture, approvals, funding, file uploads, confirmations, and reconciliation. Just as importantly, you can link accounting, HR, and banking steps together.

With that visibility, you can see your critical failure points - areas where you have only one single thing between success and disaster - and ensure you are mitigating that risk strategically.

Turning visibility into resilience

Once processes are captured, WorkFlow’s AI reviews them against best practices and flags vulnerabilities. In payroll, that might mean:

• Triggering pre-pay cycle verifications so anomalies are caught early.

• Storing cutover checklists for switching vendors in hours, not weeks.

• Highlighting dual-control requirements so no one person can move money unchecked.

• Mapping contingency steps to ensure employees still get paid on time.

And because every engagement includes consulting support, you don’t just get software—you walk away with a fully documented SOP manual in 30 days or less.

Why this matters now

Payroll is the heartbeat of any organization. Miss one cycle, and the impact isn’t just financial—it’s cultural. Employees lose trust. Reputations suffer.

The collapse of MyPayrollHR wasn’t inevitable, but disruption is. Vendors fail, fraud happens, systems go offline. The question is whether your organization has the visibility and playbooks to keep going when it does.

WorkFlow gives you the tools to capture your real processes, reduce reliance on single points of failure, and build the resilience to pay your people—no matter what.

Ready to safeguard your critical processes?

Visit workflow.authentikconsulting.ca to see how you can have your workflows mapped, documented, and disruption-proofed in 30 days or less.