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March 26, 2026

March 26, 2026

Review key quarter-end dates and actions to ensure timely payroll processing and tax receipts.

Quarter End Key Dates

As a reminder, we’re nearing the end of Q1. Here is an overview of the key dates to keep in mind as we close out the quarter.

  • Monday, March 30: We'll reach out proactively to inform you if any of your employers have particularly large variances.
  • Thursday, April 2: Balancing payrolls approved. Tax Receipts and payment amounts become available in Console. Direct-to-employer Communications sent (if subscribed). The Quarterly Variance Report is also available to identify all employers with variances across your portfolio.
  • Thursday, April 9, 11:59 PM ET: Last chance to cancel pending balancing transactions in Console. We strongly encourage communicating upcoming collections to employers early so transactions can be processed and filings submitted on time.
  • Thursday, April 10: Balancing collection and refund transactions are sent and payrolls move to Processing.

Review our Quarter end dates in more detail in our Quarter End Playbook.

Tax Receipt Explaining Period End Balancing

Starting next week for Q1 2026 period end, a Tax Receipt will be generated for every balancing payroll. The receipt gives employers a clear breakdown of each tax adjustment resulting from period end balancing: what will be collected or refunded directly in an upcoming employer transaction vs. what will be refunded separately by the tax agency after filing.

The Tax Receipt is available once balancing payrolls are approved (April 2nd, for Q1 2026) and can be accessed as a PDF in Console — either from the balancing payroll on the Payroll Details page or the balancing transaction on the Transactions page. Read more about Balancing and the Tax Receipt in this Help Center article.

Actions to take

Please review the timelines below as a team and decide on your strategy for communicating quarter end transactions to your employers:

  1. Decide how you plan to notify employers about upcoming balancing-related transactions at quarter end, either by using direct-to-employer Communications (more on this below) or by planning your own employer communications.
  1. Review the Help Center article and prepare your Support teams on how to access and use the Tax Receipt to answer any questions on balancing-related transactions from employers.
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Direct-to-employer Communications for Quarter End

There are two new Communications objects you can subscribe to this quarter to have Check communicate upcoming balancing transactions, including the Tax Receipt, directly to your employers through white-labeled emails:

  1. Filing Period Closed — Notifies employers of the scheduled collection or refund resulting from balancing, and includes the Tax Receipt as an attachment.
  1. Tax Transfer Cancelled — Notifies employers that a previously scheduled transaction resulting from balancing has been cancelled (e.g., because the partner cancelled the transaction or a balancing payroll was reopened), and that the associated receipt is no longer current.

If you choose to use this feature to ensure that employers are notified in the event of changes to the original tax transfer, you need to subscribe to both Communications objects.

The Filing Period Closed Communication replaces the Upcoming Debit Variance Scheduled Communication for quarter end balancing transactions. Partners currently subscribed to Upcoming Debit Variance Scheduled have been automatically subscribed to both new objects. If you do not want to use these Communications this quarter, update your settings via the "Notifications" page in Console.

Announcing the Check MCP Server

We're releasing two new ways for AI agents to interact with our platform:

  • 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.

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.

These tools can be used to pull custom reports, load historical data into Check’s system for companies that are switching from a prior payroll provider, answer support questions about topics from tax applicability to employee and tax payment timing, and more.

For more information on how to get this set up, please see our API docs.

Reminder: submitted Filing status

We are introducing a new submitted status to the Filing API that provides visibility into filings that have been sent to the agency but are not yet accepted. This is now available in Sandbox and will be live on production on March 30th.

What’s changing:

  • The Filing API now supports five statuses: inapplicable, pending, blocked, submitted, and filed.
  • The new submitted status indicates that a filing has been sent to the tax agency and is awaiting processing.
  • The filing date, i.e. when a filing was submitted to the agency, is available via the status_history array. Use the most recent entry where status = "submitted" and read its status_at value. We recommend labeling this as "Filing Date" in your UI.
  • filed_at continues to represent when the agency accepted the filing.

What you need to do:

  • If you filter by status, add submitted to your recognized statuses.
  • If you display filing status, add a display treatment for submitted.
  • If you display a filing date, use status_history to extract the submitted date.
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