BrightPay comes from Bright, an Irish software group headquartered in Duleek, County Meath, with a UK office in Hammersmith. Thesaurus Software has written payroll software since 1992 and introduced BrightPay in 2012, adopting the Bright name in 2021 after merging with Relate Software. Payroll is the whole product here: HR, expenses, and time tracking sit in separate Bright applications.

Bureau work is what separates BrightPay from generalist payroll software. Bright ships the cloud product in two configurations, one for practices running many client payrolls and one for single employers, and its 2026 release notes cover batch payroll entry and approval, batch payslip distribution, and bureau statistics reporting. Pension APIs cover NEST, The People's Pension, and Smart Pension. Support is free on phone and email, staffed from Bright's Irish office by UK payroll specialists.

CIS deserves attention if you pay construction subcontractors. Bright told AccountingWEB in March 2025 that cloud users were then filing CIS on a complimentary desktop licence until a cloud version arrived. BrightCIS shipped that September as a separate module. Bright also said bureaus migrating early would keep desktop at no charge so they could move clients across in tranches.

Bright publishes no cloud price list, charging single employers per employee and bureaus on their combined active employers and employees, and routes anyone above 250 employees to sales.