Product updates

What is Year End?

As the calendar winds down and folks prepare for the holiday season, another important milestone approaches: Year End. In the payroll world, Year End is our most critical time. Payroll providers file all annual tax filings for employers, generate W-2s and 1099s for employees and contractors, and ensure employers understand new tax rates and forms that go into effect in 2025.

Why does Year End matter to employers?

As we approach Year End, it is important that employers and employees verify their payroll data for accuracy before their payroll provider files that data with tax agencies. This means employers should double check their payroll records to ensure they’ve captured all payrolls, verify their team has updated their legal information, double check benefits, and more. Inaccurate information in filings can result in downstream penalties or amendments —  a headache for everyone involved.

With this in mind, as we approached this Year End, Check built a product to guide employers through the steps of verifying data for accuracy: the Filing Checklist component.

The Filing Checklist component

The Filing Checklist Component guides employers through the most important steps to ensure payroll data accuracy ahead of year end:

1. Verify all company tax IDs and tax rates. With the Tax Setup component, employers can review and update their company tax information. Employers who are missing or have "applied for" tax IDs will see a more prominent call to attention for this checklist item.

2. Preview their team’s W-2 filings. The newly-launched Filing Preview component allows employers to preview their employees’ W-2s as either a PDF preview or CSV report.‍

3. Review other reminders, such as reviewing payroll history. This final step provides employer-friendly copy prompting employers to update their team’s information, add payrolls not yet reflected, add any missing benefit information and make any changes needed for 2025.

By embedding the Filing Checklist, partners can expect higher filing success rates and more accurate filings, which reduce the likelihood of corrections or amendments. Together, these benefits not only minimize operational work for partners, but also enable a better Year End customer experience for employers.

As we start 2025, we wish all of our partners and employers a happy and healthy New Year — and, with the Filing checklist ensuring accurate and successful tax filings, a stress-free Year End season.

Check is reinventing the payroll industry, by providing embeddable infrastructure for software platforms to build new payroll businesses. Our infrastructure allows platforms to launch payroll at a fraction of the investment than ever required before. This is dramatically increasing the dynamism of the market for payroll products, by empowering new entrepreneurs to enter the space with payroll businesses dedicated to their specific niche, like restaurants, construction and more. As a part of that mission, we knew we needed to reinvent a historically painful part of the payroll industry: support. For years, incumbents have relied on manual processes to solve challenging payroll support cases, like voids or cancelling payments, which results in longer wait times to resolve issues and subpar customer experiences.

Check is disrupting this status quo. Today we're excited to announce a full slate of new features across our Payments and Payroll surface areas that automate the painful moments of payroll, so our partners can offer truly great customer experiences.

Transforming the unhappy path of payroll

The most important responsibility of a payroll provider is getting people paid. However, in many cases that can go wrong due to workers inputting the wrong bank account, companies running payroll for the wrong amount and more. Some of the top payroll support questions we receive include:

ACH Reversals: Employers accidentally paid the wrong employee, and now need the funds back

Payment Cancellations: Employers accidentally paid the wrong amount, and want to cancel the payment before it goes to the employee, to ensure the worker gets the right amount

Voiding Payrolls: Employers ran a payroll incorrectly, and need to correct the payroll record to ensure general ledger and tax reporting is accurate

Backdating Payrolls: Employers often forget to include historical payrolls they may have run outside of your system (yes, this happens!), and now need to input payrolls from the past to ensure their tax reporting is accurate

Check has introduced new experiences to streamline handling of all of these edge cases, to make our partner’s products more nimble.

Our new Transactions API and Page in Console

We recently launched our new Transactions API and dedicated Transaction page in Check’s Console. With the new Transactions API, partners now have full visibility into every single payment that is hitting their employers' and workers' bank accounts. In the transactions page you can filter by ID, status, payment parent type, and date to see any payment related to that company.

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On this page (and via our API), users can now self serve a number of actions to handle common payroll edge cases:

Cancelling Payments (available in API and Console)

Reversing Payments (only available in Console)

Retrying Failed Debits (available in API and Console)

Retrying Failed Payments (available in API and Console)

By exposing these common edge case resolution tools in Console and our API, it makes it easy for our partners to solve customer problems faster and more efficiently.

Voiding and Adding Backdated Payrolls in Console

We’re excited to give our users more power than ever to manipulate payrolls in Console, so they can also self-serve correcting their own Payroll record in Console. The two enhancements we have made are voiding any payroll in Console and adding backdated payrolls in Console.

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Now, users have the ability to submit a void for any payroll in Console. This means partners can submit voids more quickly and accurately, resulting in fewer tax notices and penalties.

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Separately, we also introduced a way to add a backdated payroll in Console. In many cases, employers may forget to add a historical payroll in the partner’s system during setup, or intentionally run a payroll outside of the system for a bonus or a quick reimbursement to an employee. Now, partners can directly add payrolls from any date in Console, making it easier for them to ensure the full payroll record for their employers is correct, reducing the need for corrections and amendments, which can be time consuming and come with government penalties.

For the longest time, solving payroll support issues has been a manual, painful experience for all employers in the payroll industry. Incumbents have relied on human-driven processes, which are time consuming and error-prone, and leave employers in the lurch. With this new slate of features, Check is re-inventing payroll support to enable support that is significantly better than the industry for any partner that builds on top of our infrastructure. Together, we’re ensuring the edge cases of payroll are less painful, so all employers can spend less time on corrections, tax notices and amendments, and more time building the products they love.