Submitting payroll corrections
Submit payroll corrections for common errors in earnings, hours, and deductions easily.
Overview
This article will walk through the most common types of mistakes on payrolls, such as incorrect earnings, hours, workplaces, or benefit and deductions, and how to submit corrections for them to Check.
This article is focused on correcting payroll data (i.e., the earnings, deductions, and taxes on payrolls). If instead, you are looking to perform some action on the transactions associated with a payroll, such as canceling or reversing an employee credit, refer to Managing transactions.
Types of payroll corrections
Below are nine (9) different types of payroll corrections. More instructions for each type of correction and how they should be submitted to Check is provided below.
Type of correction | Description |
Incorrect earning workplace | Earnings earned at a workplace should have instead been earned at a different workplace, with a different set of applicable taxes. |
Incorrect benefits or post-tax deductions | An employee’s benefit contributions or deductions were entered under the incorrect type, or the amounts need to be modified. |
Incorrect employee or company tax profile or exemptions | An employee’s profile (e.g., residence address) or a company’s tax parameters (e.g., PFML private plan) need to be retroactively updated. |
Incorrect hours | Entered the incorrect hours amounts for an employee. |
Underpaid or overpaid an employee | Paid an employee too much or too little gross wages on a payroll. |
Paid an employee by mistake | Accidentally paid an employee who should not have been paid (e.g., was terminated). |
Entering a payroll run outside of Check | A payroll was run outside of Check, and needs to be imported. |
Duplicate employee profiles | Two employee profiles were created by mistake for a single employee, and need to be merged. |
Incorrect payroll history setup | The pay history for a company who started on Check mid-year was entered incorrectly. |
Incorrect earning workplace
This correction type refers to situations when an employee earned wages at a workplace that should have actually been a different workplace with a different set of applicable taxes (e.g., a workplace in a different state).
To move earnings to their “correct” workplace, follow the below steps in Console:
Note: this flow is currently in beta
- First, navigate to the company’s Payrolls tab in Console, and select “Corrections” in the upper left.
- To create a new correction, click “+ New correction” in the upper right, and then select the applicable tax year. Alternatively, you open any existing draft correction in the table by clicking the expand icon that appears when you hover over the row.
- In the window that appears, select “Workplace correction” from the menu on the left.
- First select an employee, then the paydays for that employee which had earnings under the incorrect workplace.
- Then, enter as many “Workplace changes” as you need:
- First, select a workplace from the dropdown on the left hand side. This dropdown will contain all workplaces at which the selected employee earned wages on the selected paydays.
- Then, select the “correct” workplace on the right hand side that all of the earnings from the old workplace will be moved to. You will see all workplace configured for the company in this dropdown. If you select a workplace that the employee does not currently have defined, it will be automatically assigned to them.
- If you need to add more workplace mappings, select the “+ Add another” button.
- After you have saved all of the workplace changes, you will see a list of “Corrected Payrolls” appear in the table on the right. At this point, you can repeat Steps #3 through #5 to enter additional corrections.
- You can click the “expand” icon next to each correction payroll to see a spreadsheet view of that payroll, with changes that have been made to that payroll in this correction highlighted. Green rows indicate new rows that have been added, and yellow highlighting indicates values that have changed.
- Once you have completed all the corrections you would like to make, check the “I confirm this correction looks as intended” box, then click “Submit correction”.
- This will create a Zendesk ticket with Check Support to process that correction, including any necessary tax adjustments, filing amendments, and money movement.
Incorrect benefits or post-tax deductions
Incorrect benefit contributions or post-tax deductions can occur for many reasons, such as benefits being misconfigured in Check, or incorrect effective dating causing them to be deducted when they should not.
The way to submit benefit and post-tax deduction corrections to Check depends on the type of action that should be taken. If you want to:
- Void or remap a deduction to a different benefit/post-tax deduction → follow the instructions below
- Add a missing benefit contribution or post-tax deduction → Submit a corrections ticket (see “Generating a Correction Template” below)
- Change the amount of a benefit contribution or post-tax deduction → Submit a corrections ticket (see “Generating a Correction Template” below)
Voiding or remapping deductions:
Note: this flow is in currently in beta
- First, navigate to the company’s Payrolls tab in Console, and select “Corrections” in the upper left.
- To create a new correction, click “+ New correction” in the upper right, and then select the applicable tax year. Alternatively, you open any existing draft correction in the table by clicking the expand icon that appears when you hover over the row.
- In the window that appears, select “Benefit or post-tax deduction correction” from the menu on the left.
- First select an employee, then the paydays for that employee on which you would like to edit benefit or post-tax deductions.
- Then enter “Remap or remove deductions”:
- First select a benefit or post-tax deduction from the left hand side that you would like to modify, and select whether you are modifying the employee or employer contributions.
- Then on the right hand side, perform one of two options:
- If you would like to remap contributions to a different benefit or post-tax deduction: Select the desired benefit or post-tax deduction and the contribution type. You will need to ensure that the employee is set up with the correct benefit or post-tax deduction before you will it as an option in this dropdown.
- If you would like to remove the contributions entirely: Select “Void contributions”.
- Click “+ Add another” to create more than one mapping or void.
- After you have saved your correction, you will see a list of “Corrected Payrolls” appear in the table on the right. At this point, you can repeat Steps #3 through #5 to enter additional corrections.
- You can click the “expand” icon next to each correction payroll to see a spreadsheet view of that payroll, with changes that have been made to that payroll in this correction highlighted. Green rows indicate new rows that have been added, and yellow highlighting indicates values that have changed.
- Once you have completed all the corrections you would like to make, check the “I confirm this correction looks as intended” box, then click “Submit correction”.
- This will create a Zendesk ticket with Check Support to process that correction, including any necessary tax adjustments, filing amendments, and money movement.
Incorrect employee or company tax profile or exemptions
There are other values in Check besides workplaces and benefits that affect tax calculations for employees. This includes things such as:
- The employee’s residence address — this affects the calculation of state income taxes and some local taxes such as Ohio school district taxes
- The employee’s primary workplace — this affects the calculation of state unemployment taxes, paid family medical leave taxes, and other similar taxes that require employees’ work to be localized to a single state. See Unemployment taxes for multi-state employees for more background.
- Various tax parameters — Various tax parameters such as whether the company has a PFML private plan, or their Washington Labor and Industries experience factor or risk class codes, affect the calculation of taxes and may require a correction if changed retroactively.
In addition, if an employee or company is exempt from a tax, and that exemption needs to be applied retroactively, that may also require a payroll correction to apply that exemption to payrolls that have already been approved.
For all of the above cases, the steps to submit these corrections are:
- If possible, make the correct changes in Console or Check API before reaching out to Check Support.
- To change an employee’s residence address or list of workplaces, navigate to the employee in Console and click the Update employee icon:
- To change an employee’s primary workplace, scroll down to employee’s Workplaces and select “Make primary” a workplace.
- To change an employee’s tax parameters or exemptions, go to the employee and then go to their Withholdings tab.
- To change a company’s tax parameters or exemptions, go to the Setup parameters tab.
- Reach out to Check support with a detailed explanation of what changed, and which employees / taxes need to be recalculated.
Incorrect hours
Hours corrections can be submitted via a Check Support ticket, and require a corrections template to indicate the “delta” in hours to be uploaded (see Generating a Corrections Template below).
Correcting hours incorrectly entered on approved payrolls generally does not affect tax calculation, with some exceptions (particularly, worker’s compensation taxes such as Washington Labor and Industries and Oregon Worker’s Benefit Fund).
If your goal is to update PTO or sick balance hours for an employee (for display on the employee’s paystub), you can accomplish that by directly editing the pto_balance_hours and sick_balance_hours fields on the Payroll Item in Check API. Both fields can still be edited even after the associated payroll is approved.
Underpaid or overpaid an employee
If an employee was under or overpaid on a payroll, often the best and most compliant way to correct that scenario is to address the issue on the employee’s next payroll.
- If an employee was underpaid: run an off cycle payroll to pay the difference of what they are owed.
- If an employee was overpaid: reduce their gross wages on their next payroll by the difference.
Federal law permits employers to deduct overpayments from future paychecks, even if it brings employees’ pay below minimum wage. However, state laws vary and it is important to confirm any restrictions or guidelines specified by each state agency. For example, some states may require written consent, or impose limits on when or how much overpayment can be deducted on a future paycheck, or may still enforce minimum wage rules.
When doing this, it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that they remain compliant with federal and state laws.
Paid an employee by mistake
If you paid an employee or set of employees by mistake, the best course of action is to void those payroll items. See Voiding payroll items in Console for instructions.
Entering a payroll run outside of Check
To record a payroll run outside of Check, refer to Recording missing or historical payrolls in Console.
Duplicate employee profiles
If an employee was accidentally set up twice in Check, their duplicate profiles need to be merged to ensure accurate tax filing and calculation.
Reach out to Check Support via Zendesk with the employee IDs that need to be merged, and which employee ID should be considered the “correct” employee ID that will be used going forward.
Incorrect payroll history setup
When a company joins Check mid-year, it is required that their year-to-date payroll history is imported to ensure accurate tax calculation and filing. It is possible that
Generating a Correction Template
The corrections template is a way to provide structured corrections data to Check by employee and payday.
You can generate a company-specific corrections template via Console. To do so, click the blue "Download Payroll Template" button under Reports on the company's Console page.
Note: It is important that you download this template at the time you need to make a correction, as the template may change over time with new taxes and earning codes.
In the template, you must first provide the following fields:
- Employee ID or Contractor ID
- Period Start
- Period End
- Payday
- Workplace ID (if the employee only has a single workplace, this can be left blank).
Corrections templates can usually be filled out on a quarterly basis, not payday by payday. When entering values for an entire quarter, use the first day of the quarter for “Period Start”, and the last day of the quarter for “Period End” and “Payday”.
Then, enter whatever values are necessary to perform the correction. The corrections template should contain the “deltas”, or the difference between the correct and original values, for whatever you are trying to edit.
For example, let’s say you are submitting a correction for an employee to reduce their total Salaried hours from 100 to 50 in Q1. The template you would provide should look like this:
Employee ID | Period Start | Period End | Payday | Workplace ID | Salaried Hours |
emp_123 | 2025-01-01 | 2025-03-31 | 2025-03-31 | wrk_123 | -50 |
Note that Salaried Hours contains -50, not 100.
Last updated on June 10, 2025