Product updates

February has been a very exciting month at Check! Even with only 28 days to work with, our engineering team was able to make several key additions to Onboard, Console, and our API. This month we released improved payment visibility, failed payment retries, and bank account validation. With the recent announcement of our series C, we are excited for a supercharged year of building to make paying people even simpler!

Get visibility into money movement

For the first time, partners have visibility into the status of money movement within Check. With the new ‘payment’ and ‘payment_attempts’ objects, you can observe payments and their corresponding attempts for completion initiated by Check on behalf of a company directly from the API. For more information, please view the updated documentation here. 

Retry failed payments

Along with viewing the status and reason for why a payment failed, you are now able to programmatically retry any failed payment with a simple API call or with the click of a button on Console. We will also support programmatic refunds and wires:

• Refunds: In the event the Company doesn’t want to retry a failed payment and wants to pay the Employee or Contractor manually via a paper check, you’ll have the ability to send the Company a ‘refund’ via Console or our API.
• Wires: Companies who see a failed ACH debit often prefer sending a wire in time for payday. If your Company would like to do this, you’ll be able to create an expected wire, view the wire details programmatically via our API and Console, and show the status of the wire to your users.

For more information, see our Payments Recovery guide here.

Validate bank accounts

Failed payments are a pain for all of us — they result in significant delays and manual operations. To help avoid failed payments, Check now proactively validates all bank accounts added by your employers, employees, and contractors. If validation fails, we’ll automatically notify you so that you can request your users to update their banking details in time for payday. To ensure account validation does not get in the way of running payroll, bank accounts may be used while validation is in progress. See our Bank Account Validation guide here.

January was a rush at Check! Our teams made improvements to our API and core products, Onboard and Console, while also supporting the ongoing effort of year-start and year-end. This month, we’ve released employee pay splits, SSN duplication checks, and company Start Date validation. 

In addition to those features, we’ve also hit embedded payroll support for all 50 states (that’s 50 states, 1267 jurisdictions, and 6829 taxes)! To learn more about this feat, check out our blog post, The Road to 50. 

Split employee pay into multiple bank accounts  

Check now allows employees to split their pay into multiple bank accounts! This feature is available in Onboard, Console, and the Check API. Employees can split net pay amounts across up to 7 accounts. Here is an example of how a net pay split will work: 

An employee configures their net pay splits as follows: 

• Priority 1: Wells Fargo checking account ending 4431 

• Amount: $500

• Priority 2: PNC savings account ending 2982

• Amount: $300

• Priority 3: Capital One savings account ending 6720

• Amount: Remainder

If the employee receives a net pay of $1000, they’ll receive:

• Wells Fargo checking (4431)

• Amount: $500

• PNC savings (2982)

• Amount: $300

• Capital One savings (6720)

• Amount: $200

See our ‘Net Pay Split’ guide to learn more about employee pay splits.

Prevent employee and contractor SSN duplicates 

We've rolled out SSN Duplicate validation to better support customer tax filings.  We've also updated our API docs to note the duplicate restrictions now in place. At a high level, the duplicate check prohibits:

• Any single company from having multiple employees with the same SSN.
• Any single company from having multiple contractors with the same SSN/ITIN.

Please note that a single company can have a contractor and an employee with the same SSN, as a company may pay one person as both a contractor and an employee throughout a tax filing period.

We've added further validation to company Start Dates 

To ensure that all selected company Start Dates are valid banking days, we’ve added validation to only allow users to select valid banking days. Users will see this change in both our API and Console. If a banking holiday is selected, the following error will occur: "Start date {start_date} must be a valid bank date."

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