The Road to 50

It’s no secret, payroll can be a major headache for employers, no matter the size. Most businesses use a payroll provider to help them with the complexity and compliance burdens that come with payroll. However, these payroll providers don’t meet the individual needs of their customers, and small and medium business owners are left to manage the inefficiencies manually. This means they’re doing everything from munging spreadsheets to manually correcting time cards. The average small business spends over 5 hours every pay period on payroll-related tasks. And while it seems like an obvious problem to solve, it’s not surprising there isn’t a better option when you consider the complexity of building and maintaining a payroll product. It’s why old-school, legacy payroll providers are still dominating the market, even though their solutions cause their customers so much pain. Software platforms need a way to break into the market, but building a payroll offering from scratch isn’t an option for most.

Why is payroll so complicated?

While it might seem like a simple solution to build a better mousetrap, payroll is more complicated than you might think. Payroll is governed by local, state and federal tax laws and regulations. And these laws have different implications depending on where people work, where they live, how they get paid, and what kind of worker they are. This complexity has made it nearly impossible for software platforms to build their own homegrown payroll product that works nationwide. Ultimately, their customers and those they employ are the ones that suffer for it. 

Embedded payroll in all 50 states

Given these challenges, what do these businesses need in order to build a payroll solution that can work for them? That is the question that the founders of Check sought out to answer. Check has created a solution that enables software platforms to embed payroll directly into their product and process payroll for their customers nationwide, in a matter of months. Gone is the need for platforms to go through painstaking processes with 50 states, 1267 jurisdictions, and 6829 taxes to offer a native payroll product to their customers. Instead, they can leave payroll compliance and tax calculations to Check, and focus on building a better, more tailored experience for customers.

Since our founding, we’ve been researching, developing, and testing our payroll infrastructure to meet the needs of software platforms and developers. Supported by a team of payroll compliance experts with over 200 collective years of experience, you can rely on Check to maintain updates on ever changing compliance rules.

To better understand the complexities of becoming a payroll provider and the process Check’s teams undergo to tackle and manage fifty-state compatibility, we put together this ebook - Becoming a Payroll Provider in the US: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly. We’ll dive into specifics on compliance nuances, why it’s historically so hard to pay folks in different states, and the unique engineering challenges of creating payroll infrastructure. 

To learn more about Check or get access to our API, drop us a line here.