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Three learnings from building 50 state support for agriculture and 501(c)(3) employers
6
min read
Some of the most impactful platform investments that we can make at Check are those that broaden the total addressable market of our partners’ payroll products. Since 2019, much of our focus on distilling the complexities of state and local regulations and unique industry needs into simple-to-use APIs has been in service of giving our partners more headroom to sell their payroll products to an increasingly large set of customers.
In 2021, we completed our journey to achieve full 50-state payroll coverage. This involved everything from tackling state tax ID registration in every jurisdiction, to navigating the complex local tax landscapes of Pennsylvania and Ohio, to handling the nuances of multi-state taxation and reciprocity.
As our partner ecosystem has grown, so too has demand to serve organizations with more specialized payroll requirements. That’s why this past year, we turned our attention to supporting two new and challenging types of employers in all 50 states: agriculture companies and 501(c)(3) non-profits.
Through a concentrated effort and close collaboration with our partners, what began as a patchwork solution limited to a few states transformed into a comprehensive framework for agriculture and 501(c)(3) payroll spanning the U.S., which we launched on January 1st, 2025.
Here are three broadly applicable lessons we learned while building this out, which will help us continue to deliver a more flexible and user-friendly experience for all of our partners in 2025 and beyond.
Simplify for Success
Simplicity is in our DNA at Check. One of our core values is simplify for success, which was the first and most important lesson that guided our approach to building out support for agriculture and 501(c)(3) organizations.
Payroll is complex. Building an embedded payroll platform that feels simple and intuitive requires carefully balancing between ensuring compliance for all of the nuances that exist in payroll, and focusing on what really matters most to our partners.
Throughout the process of building support for agriculture and 501(c)(3) businesses, we repeatedly asked ourselves, "Are there simplifying assumptions we can make without jeopardizing compliance or sacrificing the core functionality our partners need?"
Turns out, the answer to that question is often “yes”.
For example, one of the most basic requirements in agriculture payroll is that earnings from agricultural work need to be reported separately from earnings from non-agricultural work.
When we originally approached supporting this, we naturally thought to add new earning types. However, this decision created a lot of additional complexity that was hard to navigate. For example, we had to build validation such that only employees of agricultural employers could use the new earning types. This also meant that employees could potentially receive two W-2s at the end of the year, which we had to make sure our system could handle.
So instead we asked ourselves, what if instead of categorizing earnings as agriculture or non-agriculture, we categorize employees as agriculture or non-agriculture? We already knew it was the case that employees almost always exclusively used one earning type or the other, and that we could manually adjust these values in the rare case that it became necessary. After validating with compliance experts and our partners, this simple reframing of the problem turned out to be a way for us to deliver a simpler and more comprehensive solution, without compromising on compliance.
By continually asking ourselves what could be removed from or simplified about our implementation, we arrived at a solution that was simpler, could be implemented faster, and maintained more easily.
AI-Assisted Compliance Research
AI-assisted workflows are being embedded in companies across every industry. Check is no exception, and one place that we see AI having a huge impact is in understanding and staying on top of the constantly evolving landscape of payroll compliance requirements.
Tracking payroll compliance is a problem that is uniquely suited for AI-assisted workflows because of the federated nature of payroll regulations in the United States. Understanding a payroll requirement is often not just a matter of researching the requirement itself — it’s also researching that same requirement across each of the 50 states, and understanding the unique quirks and nuances of each state. That’s one place where AI can play a key role; if you know the right questions to ask, AI-assisted research can save tremendous time in scaling your understanding of those questions across tax jurisdictions.
This was especially relevant as we were building out 50 state agriculture and 501(c)(3) support. Take, for example, the fact that 501(c)(3) businesses can elect to become reimbursable employers for State Unemployment Insurance (SUI), meaning they directly reimburse the agency when unemployment benefits are claimed, rather than pay into the tax on each payroll. That requirement was easy enough to identify and understand on its own. However, where AI-assisted research accelerated our progress was in researching how the requirements for SUI reimbursable employers differed across states, and answering questions such as:
- Do all states offer reimbursable SUI options to 501(c)(3)s or do some not offer that option?
- Are reimbursable employers exempt from each state’s related SUI surcharges and administrative fees?
- How do reimbursable employers need to be indicated as such on the state’s SUI returns?
Leveraging AI to answer these questions allowed us to scale our understanding of agriculture and 501(c)(3) support across all 50 states far more quickly than we ever could have before. And it puts our compliance experts in the higher leverage role of reviewer and editor, rather than researcher.
Building a Platform Over Building a Product
Rather than taking the requirements of agriculture and 501(c)(3) companies and hardcoding them as logic in our platform, we instead distilled them down to the fundamental payroll “building blocks” that are necessary to support these companies, but may be relevant for a variety of other payroll use cases as well.
One of the most important building blocks that unlocked our ability to add support for these specialized companies was the Tax Elections API, which allows users to directly control tax exemptions for companies and employees. This more generalized piece of functionality became key for agriculture and non-profit support because there are many scenarios that might lead companies or employees of these types to be exempt from a set of taxes, such as an employee being a clergy member in certain states.
By taking this approach of focusing on payroll “building blocks” and exposing more configuration in our platform, we put the power back in the hands of our partners and their customers to handle any variety of scenarios they encounter. It also saves Check from needing to build a tremendous amount of case-specific complexity into our platform.
We’re thrilled to have been able to invest in our partners’ growth with agriculture and 501(c)(3) support, and the lessons we have taken from this process will play an important role as we continue to expand our embedded payroll platform to further use cases in 2025 and beyond.
If you’re looking to grow your payroll offering in industries like agriculture and 501(c)(3), or tackling other unique challenges, we’d love to hear from you.
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