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.
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 five setup stages
Company Setup is a checklist of five stages. Click any row to expand it in place and fill it in — there's no forced order and no "Next" button marching you through a wizard.
| Stage | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Production info | Company name, FEIN, and business address |
| Pay schedule | Pay frequency and starting check number (edited in Settings → Company — see below) |
| Unions on this production | Which unions apply, or confirming you're non-union |
| Bank & checks | The funding account payroll pays from |
| Payroll provider | The authorized signer for Check, Greenroom's payroll provider, plus a link to Check's own hosted onboarding |
Each stage shows a short status line (for example, "2 unions selected" or "Add the funding account") so you can see what's outstanding without opening it.
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.
See General Information, Union Setup, and Bank Setup for the details of the first four stages. The fifth — 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. Save an authorized signer (first name, last name, email, and a title — Authorized Signer is the default option, alongside Owner, Member, Manager, Officer, and Partner), then click Open Check onboarding to complete the rest — tax setup, payment documents, and verification — directly on Check's own hosted site, in a new tab. Once you've saved a signer, this stage counts as done on your checklist even if you haven't finished everything on Check's site yet; a status badge (Not started / Blocking / Completed) plus a plain-language list of whatever Check says is still outstanding stays visible here so you can track it.
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. It has 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, and check start number), Chart of accounts (your GL codes), Team (who has access), Activity (an audit log of changes), and Pricing (a read-only look at your plan's costs).
Everything in Production Info (company name, FEIN, address) stays editable from Settings → Company after setup — filling it in once during setup doesn't lock it.
Best practices
- Fill in Production info and Bank & checks first — they unblock the most (payees can't be paid without them).
- 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.
Next steps
Continue with General Information for Production info, then Union Setup and Bank Setup. See Tax Authorization Forms for how tax filing actually gets set up with Check.