October 23, 2025

This quarter, we are revamping quarter end balancing and variance processing.

After the end of every quarter, Check performs a “balancing” process for the taxes that were calculated on payrolls or imported on external payrolls within the quarter. This ensures that wages and tax amounts align with agency requirements, and prevents failed filings or tax notices. As part of that process, employers may receive a collection or refund for variances in tax amounts that arose throughout the quarter.

Because this process only happens after the end of every quarter, Check Partners and Employers have historically had limited lead time to understand and address root causes of variances before they need to be processed in order to begin filing. We have also heard from partners that there is a need for more visibility into these variances; for example, a breakdown by employee or by tax.

Beginning this quarter, we are addressing these gaps by introducing “balancing” payrolls. These will be read-only, draft payrolls, which are updated on a weekly basis and contain the tax variances for all taxes to date in the current quarter. With these “balancing” payrolls, you will now be able to review tax variances for a company far in advance of quarter end and see clear breakdowns of variances by employee and tax.

Beginning next week, Check partners will see “balancing” payrolls containing TX State Unemployment Tax. Throughout Q4, as “balancing” payrolls are refreshed weekly, additional taxes will be added over time.

We are introducing a new process for handling Penalties & Interest (P&I) for tax notices. Currently, there are instances when Check remits P&I to the tax agency on behalf of the employer. Moving forward, Check Support team members will credit your Employers directly for P&I, not tax agencies. In the case of a Check error, we will cover the P&I. If it's a Partner error, we’ll include the amount in your next invoice.

What This Means for You To stop P&I from accruing and to resolve notices quickly, the fastest path is to:

Further, to help reduce friction, Check will automatically credit negligible amounts to partners, even for issues caused by Employers or Partners.

What’s Next

This new process will go into effect on November 1, 2025 and will be Check’s standard approach to handling tax notices for the foreseeable future. This change is intended to increase efficiency and ultimately give Partners more control.

We’re planning to introduce support for direct remittance to agencies by mid 2026. Until then, direct employer payment with Check credit is the fastest solution available.

For more information on our P&I policy, please take a look at our Help Center article.

We have added a new endpoint to the Payroll Items API which enables you to update multiple payroll items in a single request. Up to 500 items now can be updated in a single request. This endpoint was released last week in Sandbox and is available in Production as of today.

You can now set a custom reply-to email address for Check communications.

Previously, emails were sent from a no-reply address. Emails will still be sent from no-reply@checkhq.com, but with this update, you can now configure a reply-to email per notification type in Console. This allows your team to directly receive and respond to replies from your customers.

If no reply-to email is set, messages will continue to use the default no-reply address.

The reply_to field is now available in the email object returned by the Communications API. The no_reply field logic has also been updated to reflect this new behavior.Demo

Watch a quick demo on Loom. For more details, see our Communications guide.

We’re enhancing the descriptions that are available in the ach_details object in the Payments API for increased clarity. This will be available in Sandbox on Friday, October 24 and will be released to Production on Friday, October 31. The description will read Credit/Debit to/from employer for reason for company_id, with the possible reasons listed below: