Launching Payroll with Check: A closer look

August 17, 2023
Sid Madhubalan

Senior Program Manager

by 
Sid Madhubalan

Payroll is complicated–Check makes paying people simple.

Launching any new product is often a daunting task. Payroll is no exception and in fact, payroll is a more complex, higher stakes launch than most products. Not only are you creating a new line of business for your company, but you are handling money movement, filing tax forms, and most importantly, ensuring employees are paid on time. No one understands that better than Check. Check is the creator of embedded payroll and powers more 50-state payroll products than anyone else.

Crawl, walk, run

There’s no such thing as a trial period in payroll. It’s an industry where trust is hard to build and is easy to lose.  It’s critical to work with an experienced provider who doesn’t just know the ins and outs of payroll, but is behind the most successful and fastest growing embedded payroll businesses today. 

At Check, we work with our partners to help build their initial product and phase the rollout in a way that pressure tests this new offering. Launching a new product shouldn’t come at the risk of upsetting or alienating existing customers. With Check’s guidance,  our partners solidify their processes before opening the aperture to a broader audience. The goal is to build muscle memory while you crawl so you can run with the conviction that you know how to support your customers. This approach is nothing new in software, and it’s even more critical in payroll. 

Working with Check means you can take the guesswork out of building payroll, and focus on crafting tailored solutions for your customers.

Breaking it down to the sum of its parts

Ready to embed payroll into your platform? When an organization chooses to launch payroll, there are three key work streams that must be successfully executed, almost simultaneously:

  • Engineering, product, & design (EPD)
  • Revenue
  • Support & operations

You must scope and build a payroll product that serves the needs of your customers. You need the ability to successfully take this new product to market and sell it at scale. Your organization needs to know how to onboard customers to payroll and support them once they are live. 

At Check, we not only advise you in your launch, but we become an extension of your team. We are in the weeds with support and implementations to reduce the burden of payroll. We work with your sales team by providing training, creating marketing materials, and working in tandem to meet goals. When you launch payroll with Check, you have a partner from the onset.

EPD

We provide our partners with tailored build plans that allow them to get to market quickly. We unblock their development with reactive, real-time API and solution-expertise provided by Check engineers with in-depth knowledge of the Check codebase and partner product architecture. Our team has also built a suite of white label components that power end-to-end experiences. This approach enables our partners to launch payroll in as little as a couple months.

Revenue

Payroll is a big commitment, and when done right, it comes with a consistent revenue stream.  Launching payroll is unlike any other product launch–partners are investing deeply in a new business that can and should reap long term benefits and revenue. In order to make our partners successful, Check supports the full sales cycle. We provide more than just guidance. Our goal is to integrate payroll into your existing go-to-market strategy in an unobtrusive way.

Support & Operations

Switching payroll providers is no small task and much of that falls on support teams. The migration process involves carefully balancing year-to-date payroll history and implementing withholding information to ensure you can accurately calculate taxes and generate tax forms. In order to ensure accuracy and speed to market, Check provides our partners with an implementation service that minimizes the complexity involved in a payroll migration. 

The ethos of our engagement methodology is prescription and responsiveness. We simplify the process by giving you detailed playbooks that outline the minimum amount of information you need to be successful and provide you with subject matter expertise to double-click when needed.

Why payroll? Why Check?

When the promise you make is to pay people accurately and on time, the stakes are high. Payroll is the hub of hubs and an industry of edge cases. It’s also a service that every one of your customers needs. 

Your customers are likely being underserved because of antiquated payroll technology and onerous manual processes. Embedding payroll with Check is the opportunity to simultaneously increase retention while creating new revenue. In addition to core payroll, you gain access to an entire ecosystem of employee services and additional revenue streams like benefits offerings. Most importantly, you improve the lives of your customers and the people they pay every week.

Check’s business strategy is built such that our partners' growth is inextricably tied to ours. Our partner’s success is existential to our own. That’s what makes working with Check so exciting, and what drives us to support our partners as an extension of our own team.

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