Payroll is the complete list of employees a company pays and the total amount of money needed to pay them. When a business has 50 people on its payroll, that means it employs 50 people. The company's payroll might be $2 million a year if that's what it costs to pay everyone's wages and salaries combined.

The word also refers to the actual process of paying employees. Every week or two weeks, companies run payroll: they calculate how much each person earned, subtract taxes, and send out paychecks or direct deposits. A small restaurant might have a simple payroll with just a few workers, while a large corporation might have tens of thousands of employees on its payroll and need special software to manage it all.

You might hear someone say a company had to “cut payroll” during hard times, meaning they had to lay off workers because they couldn't afford to pay everyone. Or a newspaper might report that a new factory will add 200 jobs to the local payroll, meaning 200 more people in that town will have jobs and paychecks. Payroll represents both the people who work for an organization and the money that flows out to pay them, which is often one of any business's biggest expenses.