Company Setup Introduction
Getting started with company setup in Greenroom
Before you can run real payroll, Greenroom needs a complete picture of your production and has to review and approve it. That review is the only thing company setup gates — you can start adding payees, building onboarding packets, and exploring reports the moment your company is created, without waiting for approval.
This page describes Company Setup — a checklist you fill out once, not a settings area you return to often. For ongoing changes after setup (updating your address, changing pay frequency, and so on), see Settings vs. Company Setup below.
Starting a new company
Creating a company only asks for three things: Company name (required), Show name (optional — e.g., "The Tempest"), and FEIN (optional; you can add it later). As soon as you save, you're taken straight to Company Setup — it's the natural next step, not a detour.
Right after you create a company, Greenroom tells you up front that Check's own company validation takes 24–48 hours and has to finish before payroll can run — and that new companies start on the default processing window with a slower funding timeline, with faster options unlocking after roughly 10 successfully funded payrolls. None of that blocks setup itself; it's just timeline-setting for what happens after you submit for review.
Where to find it
Company Setup lives in the left-hand navigation as its own item, labeled Company setup — it isn't a tab inside Settings. It shows up in the nav automatically while your company hasn't been approved yet; once Greenroom approves you, it drops off the nav (the page itself still exists if you need to revisit anything).
The six setup stages
Company Setup is a checklist of six stages, presented as a step-by-step wizard with a clickable stepper at the top — jump to any stage directly, or use Back and Save and continue to move through them in order. Save and continue saves the stage you're on before it advances, and stays put with the reason shown if that save is refused; a stage you didn't touch is left alone. There's no requirement to finish one before opening another.
| Stage | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Business info | Company name, FEIN, business address, business type, phone, website, expected payee count, expected first-payroll date, and (optional) d/b/a name and nonprofit status |
| Pay schedule | Pay frequency and starting check number (also editable in Settings → Company) |
| Production & unions | Your production type (Broadway / Off-Broadway / Development) and which unions — if any — you run under, each with its own contract |
| Bank & checks | The funding account payroll pays from |
| State tax registrations | Your state unemployment (SUI) and withholding registration, required before payroll can be submitted for review |
| Payroll provider | The authorized signer for Check, Greenroom's payroll provider, and the tax-filing signature ceremony |
Each stage shows a short status line (for example, "2 states on file" or "Add the funding account") so you can see what's outstanding without opening it. Once you attempt to finish setup, any incomplete required stage turns into an error state in the stepper and in a summary you can jump from directly.
Pay frequency defaults to weekly and the starting check number defaults to #5001 the moment your company is created — so "Pay schedule" often already shows complete even before you've touched it. Change either one any time in Settings → Company.
Business info now asks for a lot more than name, FEIN, and address
A prior version of this page described a three-field Production info stage. That stage has been renamed Business info and now collects several more fields Check requires to create your company — see General Information for the current field list.
See General Information, Union Setup, Bank Setup, and Tax Configuration for the details of the first five stages. The sixth — Payroll provider — is covered below and in Tax Authorization Forms.
The Payroll provider stage
This stage connects your company to Check, the payroll provider Greenroom runs on, and asks one one-time question before your first payroll: whether anyone on the production has already been paid through another payroll provider this year (so wages already paid can be carried across rather than double-taxed — this closes permanently at your first approved payroll, so it can't wait).
Save an authorized signer — first name, last name, email, and a title (Authorized Signer is the default, alongside Owner, Member, Member Manager, Manager, Managing Director, Officer, Partner, and General Partner). Saving a signer creates your company at Check and, once your business address is complete, unlocks two ways to reach the tax-filing signature ceremony — Email signing link or Open in my browser. See Tax Authorization Forms for how that ceremony works, or Sending the Signer Link for the signer's own side of it — link delivery, the embedded ceremony, and what happens if it fails. Once you've saved a signer, this stage counts as done on your checklist even if the signature and the rest of Check's own onboarding aren't finished yet; a status badge (Not started / Blocking / Completed), a plain-language list of whatever Check says is still outstanding, and — once signed — the executed authorization documents themselves all stay visible here so you can track progress.
Submitting for review
Once every required stage is complete, Submit for review lights up at the top of the page (it's greyed out with an explanatory tooltip until then). From there:
| Status you'll see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not submitted | Setup isn't finished, or you haven't submitted yet |
| Under Greenroom review | Submitted — Greenroom is reviewing your company |
| Changes requested | The reviewer left notes (shown right on this page) — address them and resubmit |
| Approved — payroll unlocked | You're clear to run real payroll |
Approval only unlocks payroll. Setup, payees, packets, and reports all work before you're approved — don't wait on Greenroom's review to start onboarding payees.
Settings vs. Company Setup
These are two different places, and mixing them up is the most common source of confusion:
- Company Setup (
Company setupin the nav) is the one-time approval checklist described on this page. - Settings (
Settingsin the nav) is where you manage the company on an ongoing basis. As a company manager you'll see six tabs: Me (your own profile, sign-in, and two-factor recovery codes), Company (name, show name, FEIN, address, plus display-only banking fields, pay frequency, check start number, and your production type), Chart of accounts (your GL codes), QuickBooks (export account mapping and chart-of-accounts upload), Team (who has access), and Activity (an audit log of changes).
Pricing is a seventh tab, but only Greenroom staff see it
A Pricing tab exists in the same Settings area, showing a read-only look at plan costs — but it's filtered out for anyone who isn't a Greenroom super admin. Company managers have no decision to make there, so it isn't part of the six tabs you'll actually see.
Company name, FEIN, and address stay editable from Settings → Company after setup — filling them in once during setup doesn't lock them. The fields that were added to Business info later (business type, phone, website, d/b/a, nonprofit status, expected payee count, expected first-payroll date) are a different story: they only live on the Company Setup wizard today, not in Settings → Company, so if one of them needs a correction after setup, go back to the Business info stage rather than looking in Settings.
Production type is locked once you're approved
Production type is editable from either Production & unions on the wizard or the Company tab in Settings — but only until Greenroom approves your company. After approval it reprices every future platform fee, so changing it becomes a request to your Greenroom contact rather than a self-service edit.
Best practices
- Fill in Business info and Bank & checks first — they unblock the most (payees can't be paid without them).
- Finish State tax registrations before you send a signing link — Check refuses the tax-filing signature ceremony until New York setup is far enough along, so doing it out of order just means resending the link later.
- Save an authorized signer for the Payroll provider stage early; Check's own onboarding can take a few days to clear on their end, so don't leave it for the last minute.
- If you're not sure whether something is missing, check the one-line status under each stage's name rather than opening every stage to look.
Common setup issues
A stage won't show as done
Re-open it and check the status line — it names exactly what's missing (for example, "Missing FEIN and business address"). Nothing here is validated against outside records automatically; it's checking that the fields are filled in, not that they're correct.
Submit for review is greyed out
Hover the button — the tooltip says setup isn't finished yet. Open each stage and check its status line for what's outstanding.
Changes requested after submitting
Read the reviewer's note (it displays directly on the Company Setup page), fix what it describes, and use Resubmit for review — you don't need to redo stages that weren't flagged.
I clicked Continue and my edits disappeared
That was real until 2026-08-30: the wizard's Continue button only moved to the next stage, so anything typed but not saved with the stage's own Save button was lost. The button is now Save and continue on every stage that has something to save, and it writes your edits before it moves — or stays on the stage and shows why if the save is refused. The per-stage Save buttons still work exactly as before.
Next steps
Continue with General Information for Business info, then Union Setup, Bank Setup, and Tax Configuration for state tax registration. See Tax Authorization Forms for how the tax-filing signature actually gets set up with Check.