Company Review
Evaluate your company's creditworthiness with Check's comprehensive onboarding Company Review process.
Overview
During a company’s onboarding process, Check conducts a Company Review process to evaluate the company’s creditworthiness and legitimacy. This is a critical part of mitigating financial risk.
As part of the Company Review process, Check will make a decision about the processing timeline we are able to offer to the company, which is ultimately one of three options:
- Approved for accelerated processing
- Approved for three-day processing
- Not approved to run payroll through Check
This article lays out Check’s process for making the initial processing timeline decision, as well as steps that can be taken to upgrade a company’s processing timeline after that initial decision.
Information collection and Company Review kickoff
Required information: When Check receives the minimal set of required information about a company via the Enrollment Profile object, the company’s enrollment with Check is automatically initiated, starting with the Company Review process. The required information (outlined in Check's API docs) includes:
- Business legal name
- FEIN
- Business address
- Business phone number
- Signatory object
- Industry type
- Employee and contractor counts
Additional information: Partners may opt to send Check additional, optional information about the company. Additional information may increase the likelihood that a company is approved for accelerated processing. This information is also submitted via the Enrollment Profile object. Additional information can include:
- Company website
- Company social media
- Whether or not the company has been approved for payment processing on the partner's platform (approved_for_payment_processing)
- Processing Period at previous payroll provider (existing_payroll_customer_processing_period)
- Estimated total amount of money paid to employees and contractors per pay period (pay_period_amount)
- The date the company joined the partner's platform (user_since)
- Plaid-linked bank account
Initial decision
After receiving and evaluating this information, Check will decide which processing timeline we are able to offer the company. Partners are notified of this decision via a support portal ticket and webhook.
Check will assign the company one of five potential decision outputs.
Case 1: Approved for accelerated processing
If the company is initially approved for accelerated processing, Company Review is now complete. No additional documentation is required; no Document Requests via the Requirements API are created for the company at this time.
Case 2: Waiting period for accelerated processing
Company must successfully run 10 payrolls on three-day processing, or wait 90 days, whichever is longer. After this waiting period, the company will automatically be approved for accelerated processing.
The most common reason for a company to be put on a waiting period is if they are a new company with no payroll history.
Note: If a Company does not pass Check's risk assessment, they will be put on standard processing permanently (with no opportunity to graduate to accelerated processing).
Case 3: Approved for three-day processing
In some cases, companies are approved to run payroll on Check but are not approved for accelerated processing due to their risk profile. The most common reasons a company is not approved for accelerated processing are:
- Company did not pass credit approval process
- Company will only be paying contractors
Case 4: Additional documentation required to run payroll with Check
If a company is not initially approved to run payroll on Check, we will typically request additional information about the company. Once this information is submitted (see Risk document requests for more detail), Check will reconsider our processing timeline decision for the company.
Check’s Requirements API will surface this as one of several types of document requests, depending upon the nature of the concern we have with the business. The different types of document requests, and the associated accepted documents, are:
- Federal EIN Verification
- IRS Form SS4
- (Check previously accepted other documents for this request type (outlined here), which have since been deprecated and will soon be removed)
- Company Identity Verification
- Articles of Incorporation
- Full bank statement
- (Check previously accepted other documents for this request type (SS4, 940, etc — full list here), which have since been deprecated and will soon be removed)
- Signatory Identity Verification
- Non-expired government-issued photo ID
- State Registration Verification
- State registration document
If the additional documentation provided is sufficient, the company may be either approved for an accelerated processing period, or we may approve the company only for three-day and request additional Company Financial Verification for an accelerated processing period consideration (i.e. Case 3).
Case 5: Not able to run payroll with Check
In certain circumstances, such as companies that operate in prohibited industries, we are simply not able to provide payroll services for the company. In this case, the company’s application will simply be denied, and no additional documentation will be requested. This will be noted with a “denied” KYB status in the implementation_status on the company object.
Last updated on January 31, 2025