At Check, fostering an excellent developer experience is always top of mind. We focus on building tools that give you the flexibility to create the payroll product that will best serve your customers. That’s why, starting today, you can use the metadata parameter on our supported resources to add auxiliary data to Check objects. Metadata drastically augments the flexibility of an API by enabling developers to store arbitrary structured data on the API’s resources. With metadata, storage capabilities are no longer limited to the set of fields exposed by the API. 

You can use metadata to store all sorts of data, from link IDs that allow you to directly correlate your system’s representation of a record to a record in Check, to additional fields or annotative descriptions that allow you to customize the metadata object to suit the needs of how you plan to run payroll.

For a quick taste of metadata in action, take a look at this example of adding a note to a PayrollItem:

curl --request PATCH \
  --url https://sandbox.checkhq.com/payroll_items/itm_cCbsJvSfNfsYF44SBz3q \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '
  {
    "metadata": {
      "internal_id": "d4cd1324-df86-4f7d-b451-b0c4db7b5425"
    }
  }'

Response:

{
  "id": "itm_cCbsJvSfNfsYF44SBz3q",
  "payroll": "pay_h0fVALn0ZzSMC1LYAepS",
  "employee": "emp_TUrOpiuLPhtjjdxEWmnq",
  ...
  "metadata": {
    "internal_id": "d4cd1324-df86-4f7d-b451-b0c4db7b5425"
  }
}

Metadata is another step towards cultivating a better developer experience, further solidifying Check as the most flexible embedded payroll platform.

For an in-depth rundown of how to use this feature, including a complete list of the supported resources, check out our Metadata Guide. You can also find our updated documentation for resources that support metadata in our API reference.