Providing platform transparency using webhooks

If you know anything about running payroll, you know that it can be a complex and cumbersome process. Check's goal is to streamline and abstract as much of that complexity as possible, so our software platform partners can focus on the most important task: building a tailored front-end for their customers. That said, there are many parts of the payroll process, like transferring money via ACH and submitting tax forms, that must happen asynchronously in the background. Having a simple way to receive instant notifications when these state changes occur is critical for our partners as it enables them to keep their data models in sync and take action on any successful or unsuccessful events.

For that reason, at Check, we have long believed that making the payroll process fully observable is an important goal in building an intuitive payroll platform. More importantly, it’s a necessary step to provide the transparency our partners require in order to build fantastic experiences for their customers. For example, our partners might need a notification when the status of a payroll_item transitions to paid in order to send an email to an employee letting them know they’ve been paid. Last year we took the first step towards this vision with the release of payroll lifecycle webhooks, and followed it this winter with the launch of document webhooks. But these were just the beginning.

Today, we’re proud to announce webhook support for all of our critical API resources, including events such as creating company, employee, and contractor objects. This release gives our partners the ability to notify relevant parties of all critical events and gives them complete visibility into the essential steps of the payroll process.

Using these new webhooks, our partners can more efficiently build robust payroll workflows. Here are a few examples:

• Track when employees complete Check Onboard steps — an employee’s SSN is required to run payroll for them, and it is often provided asynchronously through Check Onboard. Our partners now see a webhook when an employee’s profile is updated with an SSN, which helps track if a company is ready to run payroll.
• Catch employee onboarding status changes from new workplaces — adding or removing an employee's workplace can change the required withholding information for that employee (changing their onboarding status to ‘blocking’).
• Get notified of crucial Check Console changes — work being done through Check Console can be difficult for a partner’s API to observe without excessive polling. By sending webhooks on crucial changes from Console, our partners are more confident that the data between our systems are aligned.

For more information on how to get started using Check’s API webhooks, refer to our webhooks guide, which includes a list of our supported webhook events. To connect your application to listen to webhooks, head over to webhooks reference. If you’ve already configured webhooks and are set up with Console, you can visit your Console’s ‘Developer’ tab to view your stream of webhook events.