Payroll Processing Introduction
Overview of payroll processing in Greenroom
Running payroll in Greenroom means creating a run for a pay period, letting Greenroom pull in everyone who's ready to be paid, reviewing what it calculated, and submitting it. This page is the map — the steps, the payee types, and the states a run moves through. For click-by-click walkthroughs, see Creating a Payroll Run and Adding Employees.
Single-state (NYC) at launch
Greenroom runs payroll for one state at a time today. If a production tours or otherwise needs multi-state withholding, see Known Gaps before relying on it.
Before you can run payroll
Running payroll is gated on your company's setup being submitted to and approved by Greenroom. This happens once — it's not a per-run checklist. Six stages have to be complete:
| Setup stage | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Production info | Legal name, FEIN, and business address |
| Pay schedule | Pay frequency and starting check number |
| Unions | The unions engaged on this production, or a confirmed non-union status |
| Bank & checks | A verified funding account |
| State tax registrations | Your state withholding and unemployment registrations. Greenroom supports New York only today and refuses any other state outright — see Tax Configuration |
| Payroll provider | An authorized signer and completed onboarding with Check (only required once Check is connected) |
The Run Payroll page shows what's left and greys out "Submit for review" until every required stage is done. Once Greenroom approves your company, that same page shows the pay-period picker instead of the setup checklist, and you can create runs.
How a run gets built
Open a new draft and Greenroom fills it in — there's no dialog for hand-picking who's on this week's payroll. Every payee (employee, loan-out, contractor, or vendor) who is fully onboarded and either has a pay rate on file or carried recurring pay forward from the previous run gets a line automatically.
If someone you expect is missing, it's almost always one of:
- Still onboarding. They show up in a "not ready" panel on the Employees & Loan-outs or Vendors & Contractors step, with the specific gap — a missing pay rate, a missing document, pending work authorization — and a link to finish it. Finishing it doesn't add them to the current run, though: payees are only pulled onto a run at the moment it's created, so a payee who finishes onboarding mid-week joins the next run.
- Removed from this run. Someone excluded them. Their pay data isn't deleted — see Removing a payee from the run.
- A brand-new vendor with no pay rate and no payment history yet. Confirm with your Greenroom contact how to get a new vendor's very first payment onto a run if this comes up — a vendor with no rate on file and no prior run to carry from won't be pulled in automatically, and won't show up in the "not ready" panel either, since onboarding-completeness is the only thing that panel checks.
- A non-union contractor or loan-out paid by invoice, before you've flagged them as such. A contractor or loan-out who bills per-invoice rather than carrying a standing rate has a real fix: on their payee profile, turn on Invoice-based payment (requires a tax ID on file, and no union assignment — union payees are always paid on their agreement's rates). Once set, Greenroom seeds them onto every new run automatically with no rate, ready for a manual one-time payment line, the same way a vendor is. This toggle is contractor/loan-out only — Greenroom never shows it for vendors, since vendors already bill by invoice by type.
The five steps of a payroll run
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Employees & Loan-outs | Review hours, pay, and adjustments for everyone on staff payroll, including Child Trust (Coogan) allocations for minors. |
| 2. Vendors & Contractors | Enter this week's payment for each vendor and contractor, and review Representatives — agent, manager, and other commissions owed out of payees' pay. |
| 3. Payroll Summary | The full financial review — totals, GL coding, and deterministic warnings (an unaudited rate book, a payee with no fringes calculated where one's expected). |
| 4. Union Reports | Per-union fund remittance detail. Every union with payees on the run needs to be marked reviewed before you can submit. |
| 5. Submit Payroll | The funding recap, any required second approval, and the submit button. |
Money a union is owed by contract rather than by a week's work — an SDC initiation's Health and Pension at signing — isn't part of a run at all. It lives on its own screen: Union Obligations.
Steps 1 and 2 are always open, and you can move between them freely. Steps 3–5 unlock as you go: Payroll Summary once every included payee is approved (or the run has moved past Draft), Union Reports once the run is past Draft, and Submit once Union Reports is done. See Creating a Payroll Run for what happens at each step.
Payee types
Every payee on a run is one of four types. There's no separate "Agent" or "Manager" payee type — a representative is configured on a payee's own profile and paid as a side effect of processing that payee's payroll. See Representatives & Child Trust Payments.
| Type | What they are | Tax treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Employee | W-2 staff on the show's payroll | Full withholding |
| Loan-out | A performer or creative paid through their own loan-out corporation | No withholding; 1099 |
| Contractor | An individual paid for creative or production services | No withholding; 1099 |
| Vendor | A company billing for goods or services | No withholding; 1099 |
Run types
You pick the run type when you create the run — see Creating a Payroll Run.
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Regular | The standard weekly run. Payees, contract premiums, and recurring allowances carry forward from the last regular run automatically. |
| Off-cycle | Bonuses, reimbursements, advances, or other one-time payments outside the regular schedule. Starts with everyone excluded — you opt in who's actually getting paid. |
| Prepay | Recording wages or payments already made outside Greenroom (a hiatus-week advance, for example). Starts with everyone excluded; Greenroom calculates and remits any required taxes, and keeps the later regular run covering that period from paying the same people twice. |
| Amendment | Correcting a run that's already been paid. Copies that run's payees (all excluded — opt in whoever you're correcting) and takes corrections as payment lines rather than edits to the original. |
Payroll run states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Being built. Fully editable. |
| In review | Past the entry steps, in the Summary / Union Reports / Submit part of the wizard. Still fully editable — clicking "Edit payroll" sends it back to Draft. If your company requires a second approver and this run has been sent for approval, it displays as Awaiting reviewer instead. |
| Approved | Cleared any required second approval. Locked — no further edits. |
| Processing | Sent to Check for disbursement. Locked — with one exception: if Check refuses because the pay date's approval deadline has passed, the run rolls back to In review so you can pick a later date (see Payroll Run Status). |
| Paying out | Check has accepted the run and is paying people; Greenroom is waiting on bank confirmation. Locked. |
| Paid | Confirmed complete. |
There's no "Cancelled" state and no "Pending" state. A draft that's no longer needed simply stays a draft. Once a run is submitted, the only way to correct it is an Amendment against the paid run.
Accessing payroll
The main navigation has two payroll items: Run Payroll, which opens the pay-period picker (or a banner to resume an open draft or in-review run), and History, which lists every past run with its status, payee count, and totals.
Next Steps
Continue with Creating a Payroll Run to start a new payroll, or see Adding Employees to learn about the Employees & Loan-outs step.