Announcing Earning Rates

We’re excited to announce Check’s new Earning Rate API. As a developer, you now have the ability to store employee salary and hourly wages in Check as Earning Rates. This enables Check to then use that data to calculate the correct gross pay when running payroll.

Gross pay is the starting point for every payroll calculation. It represents what an employee has earned before taxes and deductions are taken out of their paychecks. In the past, platforms had to store all of the hourly and salary wages by employee and figure out how to perform gross pay calculation in their own application.

With this release, Check’s new Earning Rate API allows you to define hourly and salary rates by employee and save them in Check. This data can be used with the number of hours worked to calculate an employee’s gross pay directly in Check’s API at the time of running payroll. This simplifies what developers need to build in order to launch payroll with Check, saving time and reducing complexity when getting your payroll integration live.

How it works

An Earning Rate can be created like so:

Endpoint: /earning_rates

Method: POST

Body:

‍For an hourly employee, you should include an amount for the hourly wage and set the period to hourly. For a salaried employee, you should include their annual salary in the amount and set the period to annually.  After posting to the Earning Rates endpoint, you will receive this response:

Each Earning Rate has a unique ID for tracking so you can easily associate all of your Earning Rates to each individual employee. In addition to this, you can also associate metadata with an Earning Rate to tie other common associations such as a rate for a specific location, customer, or project.

Running Payroll with Earning Rates

When it comes time to run payroll for an employee with an Earning Rate, you can include their Earning Rate in the earnings object, along with the number of hours worked, earning type, and associated workplace.

On payroll creation, Check does the gross pay calculation on your behalf and returns the following:

In this case, the gross pay for this employee is reflected in the amount as $337.50. For salaried employees, Check will calculate the salary based on the default hours for that pay period. As an example, a weekly paid employee would have 40 hours in the Earnings Object, whereas a biweekly employee would have 80 hours in the Earnings Object. From there, you are ready to preview and approve payroll for that employee.

To learn more about using our Earning Rate API and how it works with Earning Codes and the rest of Check’s API, visit our Structuring Earnings guide. If you have questions or to request an API key and try it for yourself, contact us here.