The Invention of the Employee Time Clock
The employee time clock was invented by Willard Le Grand Bundy in Auburn, New York in 1888. The value of the clock was immediately obvious to employers, who had the unenviable task of monitoring the arrival and departure times of dozens or hundreds of employees every day to determine how much they should be paid at the end of each pay period. The device's major innovation over a standard clock was that it allowed for a piece of paper, or a card, to be fed into a slot, and when it hit a contact at the back of the slot, the current date and time information would be stamped onto the card.
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Payroll in the American Whaling Industry
The whaling industry in America grew 1,400% between 1816 and 1850. At its peak in 1880 it contributed $10 million to the United States GDP, making it the fifth largest sector of the economy. However, it wasn't just consumer demand that led to hyper-growth. A unique employee compensation structure also encouraged an entrepreneurial rush to whaling.
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The Unlikely Story of a British Tea Company, the First Business Computer, and Payroll
The development of the electronic digital computer was hastened dramatically by World War II and the accompanying need to quickly and efficiently do things like calculate the trajectories of bombs and rockets, or decode encrypted messages sent by the enemy. The first computer of this kind, dubbed “Colossus,” was developed at Bletchley Park in the U.K. between 1943 and 1945 to help crack Nazi codes.
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A Brief History of Payroll: The 16th Amendment
In the years after the Civil War, which was the impetus for Abraham Lincoln to create America's first income tax in 1861, the Federal Government's immediate need for additional tax revenue faded away. Lincoln's income tax was repealed by Congress in 1872, and by the 1880s Washington had paid off all of its Civil War debts and was running at a budget surplus from revenue collected mainly from tariffs on imports.
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A Brief History of Payroll: Withholding in America
While we may take withholding for granted today, it's a practice whose widespread adoption in America is less than 100 years old. In this blog, Ian Zapolsky, Head of Partner Engineering at Check, takes a closer look.
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How to source payroll talent (from an expert)
Jim Kohl is the Head of Payroll Operations at Check. As a certified payroll professional with a history of working in the SaaS industry, we asked Jim for advice on what our partners should consider when hiring their first payroll professionals.
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