Product updates

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.

Last year, Check announced our Full Service Embedded Setup offering to address a persistent challenge in the payroll industry: switching payroll providers is a daunting, complex process for any business. Instead of building out a costly operations team to facilitate payroll setup for new customers, more than 50% of our Partners leverage Full Service Embedded Setup. This enables them to offload the hardest parts of this time-consuming process and focus on their growth, saving days or even weeks of setup time per customer.

Today, we’re building upon this offering with the launch of our Full Service and Self Service Embedded Setup Components. This suite of ready-made components enables our Partners to productize the end-to-end payroll setup experience for all new customers, whether they are switching providers or are new to payroll entirely. This opens up new opportunities for product-led growth, empowering customers to get started with payroll independently, without ever leaving the platform.
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To better understand the importance of these tools and Check’s continued emphasis on the payroll setup experience, let’s look back at how this process of moving to a new payroll provider has evolved over time.

The Evolution of Payroll Setup

Early iterations of payroll setup were characterized by large amounts of painstaking, manual data collection. Much of the information needed to facilitate the initial setup process — things like employee details, tax information, or past payroll reports — was printed and given to the new provider as physical records.

These records would then be reviewed and painstakingly entered into the new system in a labor-intensive, error-prone process which could take months to complete.

Over time, technologies like cloud-based storage and spreadsheet tools enabled payroll providers to digitize this process. The reliance on physical documents was largely replaced by the ability to store, access, and migrate data electronically.

These advancements helped streamline payroll setup significantly, but it was still time-consuming, complex, and largely unapproachable to those without payroll knowledge. As a result, large providers began offering paid implementation services to their customers, charging anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars to complete the migration and initial setup process on behalf of the employer. This is a common practice for many payroll providers today, and the impetus for Check’s Full Service Embedded Setup offering.

The next leap forward came with the realization that, given the right guidance and tools, employers could be empowered to complete this setup process themselves. This led some incumbent providers to pioneer web-based, self-service implementation funnels, allowing their customers to conduct their own onboarding without the costly implementation fees.

The Emergence of Embedded Payroll

Soon after, Check shook up the ecosystem by introducing the concept of embedded payroll, giving other software providers the infrastructure on which to build and monetize their own payroll products.

This paradigm shift has provided an opportunity for our Partners to unlock entirely new revenue streams, but begs an important question: does every Partner hoping to offer payroll need to reinvent the large, complex wheel that is payroll setup?

We are committed to ensuring the answer to that question is no, and that our Partners have all of the tools and resources they need to offer their customers a seamless payroll setup experience on our platform — a process we at Check refer to as Embedded Setup.

We launched Full Service Embedded Setup so that our Partners don’t need to build out costly payroll operations teams to handle these complex migrations. Today, we’re launching our Setup Components to take that a step further, empowering our Partners to build best-in-class, product-led growth funnels for payroll that can rival the best of what industry incumbents are offering.

Embedded Setup Components

We’ve taken our experience from getting tens of thousands of businesses live on Check and distilled it into best-in-class components that are optimized for low lift integration and high conversion. These components enable our Partners to provide fully productized, end-to-end setup flows to their customers, spanning both Full Service and Self Service Embedded Setup.

Full Service Setup Submission Component
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For a company to be submitted to Check for Full Service Embedded Setup, a subset of basic information about the company must be provided. Until now, this information had to be gathered piecemeal through a mix of component links sent via email and manual entry in Console.

The new Full Service Setup Submission Component provides a guided submission flow that allows employers to submit themselves for Full Service Setup, without ever needing to leave the product.

With a few lines of code, Partners can empower their end customers, free up their team and set themselves up for optimal growth.

If you’re an existing Partner interested in learning more, take a look at our Guide to Full Service Embedded Setup for more information.

Self Service Embedded Setup Components
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The Full Service Setup Submission Component is just the beginning. We’re also launching a host of dedicated Self Service Embedded Setup Components for every step of the payroll setup process.

From configuring employees in Team Setup to recording year-to-date historical payrolls in Pay History, these components enable our Partners to build a product experience that not only allows employers to submit themselves for white-glove setup by Check, but empowers them to perform the setup themselves.

Building one of these components from scratch could take months, not to mention the maintenance work to keep pace with innovation in the industry and the ever-changing legislative environment. Instead, Partners can rely on Check’s deep industry expertise to build an end-to-end Self Service Setup flow that rivals the best of what incumbents can offer in the course of a few sprints.

By doing so, in tandem with leveraging Full Service Embedded Setup, Partners unlock a powerful product-led growth funnel that provides all potential customers, whether large companies switching providers or small businesses new to payroll entirely, a delightful and seamless setup experience.

If you’re an existing Partner interested in learning more about our Self Service Embedded Setup Components, take a look at our Guide to Self Service Embedded Setup for more information.

Get ready for an exciting new tool from Check, just in time for Year End! We're thrilled to introduce CheckAI Chat, designed to empower our Partners with instant, self-serve access to Check’s extensive payroll knowledge. With CheckAI Chat, navigating Year End has never been easier. Simply click the GET HELP icon at the bottom right of Console starting next week, and get answers faster than ever.

Read the full article here.