Introducing Check's MCP Server and CLI

Today, we're excited to release two new ways to interact with Check's payroll infrastructure platform, specifically designed for AI agents and the teams using them:

• The Check MCP server, which enables AI assistants like Claude, Codex, and Gemini to use Check's payroll APIs through the Model Context Protocol.
• The Check CLI, a command-line interface that allows developers and AI agents to manage payroll operations programmatically from the terminal.

Both of these tools can be cloned from our public GitHub repository and used today with any Check platform API key. We’ve also created a hosted version of the MCP server that authenticates through Check Console, so existing users can get up and running with virtually no setup required.

Both tools ship with full support for over 260 API operations, including list, filter, retrieve, create, update, and delete (where applicable) across all Check API objects. The MCP and CLI also support fine-grained tool filtering, configurable via environment variables or HTTP headers, as well as the ability to run in read-only mode.

Early adopters of these tools have used them to pull custom reports, load historical data into Check’s system for companies that are switching from a prior payroll provider, and answer support questions about topics from tax applicability to employee and tax payment timing. We can’t wait to see what our partners do next.

Why did we build this?

Interfaces are transitioning from humans using purpose-built software to complete a specific task to humans asking agents to use the tools available to complete those tasks for them. The question we should be asking is not, "What tools and features do you make available to me (as a user)?" but, "What tools do you make available to my AI Agent?"

Check's open platform makes all of its data readily available to your AI agent of choice, whether it be Claude, Codex, Gemini, or an agent of your own design. For our partners building agentic experiences inside of their products, they can plug into this capability seamlessly.

Custom reporting: A case study

Payroll reporting is a perennial headache for our partners, and the payroll industry at large. Our partners' needs vary greatly across the industries that we serve, and even similar companies within the same industry can have completely divergent requirements for the same report. At any given time, we might have as many as 50 requests for different types of reports, many of which boil down to asks for slight variations on format and structure for the same underlying data.

All of the data in these various reports is already exposed to our partners via Check's API. But surfacing that data in a way that allows an employer to customize exactly what they see takes development effort by our partners. Instead, they ask Check for a more general solution in a custom report request.

Payroll companies traditionally solve this problem by giving users access to a custom report builder. Check has one of these in our Console, but it still can’t generate every possible report a company might want.

With the Check MCP, we've been copy-pasting recent customer requests for custom reports into Claude Code and asking it to pull them. It succeeded in one shot for all of them. For our partners building agentic experiences, this means inbound customer support tickets for custom reports and the software maintenance cost of the custom report builder can both drop to near zero.

Check’s advantage

Check is the only scaled payroll provider that has built every feature on our platform with user-facing APIs in mind.

In many ways, by designing for our partners’ developers over the years we were — unknowingly at the beginning — also designing for AI agents. Because of this investment, every tool an AI agent needs to setup and run payroll for a company is already built and readily available through our open source MCP server and CLI.

Here are just a few of the things an agent can do with the Check MCP server or CLI:

• Setup a new company to run payroll
• Upload historical payroll data if migrating from a prior provider
• Onboard employees
• Add, manage, and validate bank accounts
• Manage benefits and post-tax deductions
• Generate paystubs
• Create reports

We can’t wait to see all of the experiences our partners will build with these new tools! If you are not yet a Check partner and want to learn more, reach out to our team.