Stepping up our support for contractors through Check Onboard

Part of what makes creating a payroll product difficult are the complexities involved with onboarding companies, employees, and contractors. Your go-to-market team has done the hard work to acquire a customer to run payroll through your platform, but before you can get to their first payroll and celebrate, there are important steps that need to take place. You have to:

• link the customer’s bank account
• set up direct deposits or manual payments for all employees and contractors
• collect important and sensitive information, like SSNs
• have the company, employees, and contractors all sign and submit various forms that depend on federal and state laws and regulations

Fortunately, Check offers Onboard, a whitelabeled and dynamic onboarding flow that automates all of the moving parts necessary to go from signed customer to running their first payroll. Check has made onboarding companies and employees a relatively straightforward process. Many businesses, however, have additional worker types, the most common of which is contractors.

Traditionally, contractors have been an afterthought for payroll companies, despite the fact that well over 10% of all workers in the U.S. are independent contractors, a number that only continues to grow. That’s why Check has spent the last couple of months revamping our support of contractors, adding the ability to onboard contractors through Check Onboard.

While the steps for onboarding employees and contractors overlap, they also diverge in a few places worth noting. Where employees need to sign W-4s to set up tax withholdings, contractors sign W-9s to provide important information, like taxpayer identification numbers. Where employees need to provide SSNs, contractors provide other identifying information depending on whether they’re contracting as an individual or a business.

With Onboard for contractors, your platform can quickly set up contractor payments, collect contractors’ TINs, and receive their W-9s in an easy-to-use, automated process. And keeping with the transparency of Check’s platform, all resources created for contractors are available through both the API and the Check Console. By deepening our commitment to supporting all workers, Check continues to make it even easier for your product to serve all of your customers' payroll needs. 

For more information on Onboard, see our guide, where you can also learn more about adding Onboard to your application. If you’d like access to Onboard, and are considering building payroll into your product, please reach out. We’d love to speak with you.