Hourly Switches to Check Payroll Infrastructure

The Problem: Two Incomplete Offerings

Payroll has always been central to Hourly’s offering. Founded in 2018, the company initially built its own payroll infrastructure in-house for California, including tax calculations, remittances, and filings.

While this approach worked for a single state, expanding beyond California introduced significant complexity. Payroll compliance varies widely across states and local jurisdictions, each with their own tax calculations, remittance processes, and filing requirements.

As the team explored national expansion, managing this growing web of payroll taxes internally became increasingly difficult. At the same time, the team realized that maintaining payroll tax infrastructure internally wasn’t the best use of engineering resources.

As Hourly began expanding, they first partnered with a legacy-payroll platform to extend their solution beyond California. However, that just brought on another layer of complexities. While they were able to serve more customers, they were limited by design customizations, unanswered support tickets, and a number of states that weren’t covered.

After years with a limited product, their team began to look at other solutions. Eventually, the day-to-day payroll team recommended a switch to Check.

The Solution: A True Payroll Infrastructure Partner

When evaluating new payroll infrastructure partners, Hourly wanted a platform built specifically for platforms. Because payroll is a core part of Hourly’s offering—not just an add-on—the team needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate into their existing platform.

Many existing solutions treated embedded payroll as an afterthought, making them difficult to integrate and limiting their ability to scale.

Check stood out because it was designed from the beginning as an API-first payroll infrastructure platform. The platform’s developer-friendly APIs allowed Hourly’s engineering team to integrate quickly while maintaining control over their product experience.

Once Hourly made the decision, the migration followed quickly. Because Hourly had a robust existing customer base, it made sense to switch providers at the start of the year, making for a clean cutover. However, that gave the team less than a quarter to migrate. The integration process proved to be far faster than expected. In just a couple of months, Hourly’s engineering team completed the integration and successfully migrated a thousand companies and tens of thousands of employees to Check.