Reviewing Payroll
What the Payroll Summary screen shows before you submit, and how to make changes before you do
Once every payee's pay is entered, Payroll Summary is where you check the whole run before it goes anywhere near a bank account. It's the third of five steps — Employees & Loan-outs and Vendors & Contractors come before it; Union Reports and Submit Payroll come after.
What's on the Payroll Summary screen
Top to bottom, the screen shows:
- A Check funding-mismatch notice, if Check's own pricing disagrees with Greenroom's. Unlike the warnings below, this one is a preview of a real block: submitting is refused later at Submit Payroll until it clears, because a real disagreement usually means something is mapped wrong.
- Warnings, if any. Deterministic flags like a payee paid below their union's minimum, a union payee missing an expected fringe contribution, or a union rate change landing mid-period. These are informational — they never block you from moving forward. See Payroll Calculations for the full list.
- Fund your payroll. What needs to be in your bank account for this check date, stacked up from gross wages down to the final "Total to fund" (or, once Check has priced the run, "Check cash requirement") number. See Payroll Totals for the full breakdown.
- A four-metric summary card: total gross wages, employee & loan-out wages, contractor & vendor payments, and union fringe & benefit funds.
- Fee & tax breakdown, a collapsible card with employer taxes, reimbursements, your platform fee, and postage.
- Coding summary, a collapsible card grouping every dollar by its accounting (GL) code — useful for bookkeeping, not something most productions need to check line by line.
- Payee detail by union & module — every payee, grouped by union (or by Non-Union / Creative & Production Services / Accounts Payable for everyone else), with a running gross and net for each group. A payee Check has flagged a problem with shows that warning right on their row, even before you expand it. Click a payee to see exactly what makes up their number. See Payroll Breakdown and Details for how to read this section.
Are these tax figures real?
A chip near the top of the screen tells you where the tax numbers came from, so the answer is never left to guesswork:
| Chip | What it means |
|---|---|
| Taxes: estimated | Greenroom's own calculation. Close, but not the figures that will actually be filed. |
| Taxes: synced · [time] | Check has priced this run. These are the real figures, as of that time. |
| Taxes: synced (sandbox) · [time] | The same, in a test environment — real request, not real money. |
| Taxes: sync failed — the payroll provider rejected the last attempt | In red, with the reason written underneath in plain words. |
When a sync fails, the message says what failed, what it means for this payroll, and what to do next. Some examples of what you'll see:
- "We could not finish setting this production up with our payroll provider … The amounts shown are our own estimates. Nothing on this payroll was changed — try syncing again, and if it keeps failing, contact Greenroom."
- "Our payroll provider would not confirm this production's work location … Check that the business address in your company setup is complete, then try syncing again."
The message is deliberately written for you rather than passed through from the payroll provider. The provider's own text usually names an internal object you can't see or act on; that goes to Greenroom's records instead. A failed sync never changes the payroll — you're looking at estimates until it succeeds.
This isn't a tabbed page
Payroll Summary and Union Reports are two separate steps in the wizard, not two tabs on the same screen — Union Reports is its own step right after this one, with its own per-union report grids. There's nothing to switch between here; everything above is on one continuous page.
Making changes
You can edit a payroll all the way through Payroll Summary and Union Reports — nothing locks until you actually submit.
- To fix one payee: click the pencil icon on their row to open an edit drawer for their wages, reimbursements, allowances, and deductions. Saving re-estimates that payee's taxes automatically (loan-outs and 1099 payees never trigger a tax recalculation, since they aren't withheld from the same way).
- To add or remove payees, or make larger changes: click Edit payroll (back to draft) at the bottom of the screen. This returns the whole run to Draft and drops you back on Employees & Loan-outs — every payee already entered is still there.
Note: If your company requires two people to approve a payroll before it's submitted, sending a run back to Draft clears any approvals already recorded on it. See Payroll Run Status.
Advancing to Union Reports
Continue: Union Reports opens a short confirmation with a recap — payee and payment counts, total gross wages, union fringe & benefit funds, employer taxes, and whether any calculation warnings are still outstanding — before it moves you to the next step.
What to check before moving on
There's no enforced checklist on this screen itself, but before continuing it's worth confirming:
- Every payee you expected is included, with correct hours, rates, allowances, and deductions
- The four headline totals look right against your budget or a prior, similar payroll
- Any warnings at the top of the screen are either resolved or understood
- Union payees look right — you'll get one more look at union-specific numbers on the next step
Tip: Compare this run's totals to a recent, similar payroll. The Show variance vs last payroll toggle inside each union/module card (see Payroll Breakdown and Details) does this automatically, payee by payee.
Next steps
Continue to Payroll Breakdown and Details to drill into individual payee numbers, Payroll Totals for the funding math, or Processing Payroll for the Union Reports and Submit Payroll steps that follow.