Check + Guideline 401(k) Integration Guide

Introduction

Guideline is an online retirement plan provider that offers 401(k) and other retirement plans to over 40,000 businesses in the US.

The Check + Guideline Integration enables any partner to offer 401(k)s to their customers directly in their platform much faster than a traditional integration. In the backend, Guideline will also automatically sync deductions to Check, saving employers time and management burden to keep 401(k) plans and payroll systems in sync. The integration enables our partners to:

• Quickly test for retirement product-market-fit
• Differentiate their payroll offering by adding a retirement plan offering
• Add a new high margin revenue stream

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Implementation Timeline Expectations

In order to test the Guideline component, Check requires additional information to properly stage you in Guideline. Additionally, in order to launch the Guideline component in production, you may need to sign a contract amendment.

This implementation process may take up to 2 weeks to complete.

If interested in using our component, please reach out to your Check representative to get this implementation process started.

Launching the Guideline Component

The integration to Guideline is served through a Check Component, which is an embeddable piece of UI that you can embed directly into your product via an iFrame (see Embedding a Component Guide).

To generate the Guideline Component, make a POST request to the following endpoint.

https://sandbox.checkhq.com/companies/{companyId}/components/integrations

Include the following in the body of the request:

{
 "integration_partner": "int_isqM1DgkMdj6DOPXOwgd", // use this exact ID for the Guideline
 "email": "[email protected]" // use a unique email here
}

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Email

Note: Guideline requires that an email be associated with any company going through their buying funnel. To enforce this, Check enforces that an email be present on the company object, or passed through in the request body to generate the component link. If both are present, Check will send the email in the request body through to Guideline.

Guideline Experience Walkthrough

1. Upon opening the component, employers will start on Guideline's high-converting landing page.
   
2. On this landing page, employers can view general information about Guideline and the types of plans they offer.
   
3. Additionally, employers can also learn more about pricing on this landing page.
   
4. Once an employer clicks "Get Started", employers will then authorize to share their information stored in Check with Guideline.
   

4. Employers will then be entered into the plan setup flow.
   
5. After entering some additional information, the employer will be recommended a plan.
   
6. After selecting the plan, the employer will configure the plan specifically for their employees, and then the setup will be in review. Once Guideline confirms the plan, the employer will be all set.

Guideline Benefit Creation

Guideline will automatically sync over and manage 401(k) and Roth 401(k) company and employee-level benefit objects. This will ensure these deductions are automatically applied to payrolls, preventing the employer from having to manage these deductions themselves. Benefits managed by Guideline will have a source field of int_isqM1DgkMdj6DOPXOwgd.

Note: Employees at times can take out 401(k) loans. When this occurs, paying this back will be reflected by a Guideline-managed post-tax deduction, again with the source field of int_isqM1DgkMdj6DOPXOwgd.

Required Fields

An important prerequisite to integrating with the Guideline component is building support for setting the following fields, which are not required by Check, on the Employee object:

• termination_date
• first_name
• email

Guideline Plan Status

The /accesses endpoint lists all active integrations. You can also leverage the company query parameter to retrieve the status for a single company.

https://sandbox.checkhq.com/integrations/accesses?company={companyID}

You can expect a response that includes a field called access_type which reflects a company's status with Next.

Customer Support

After the employer has signed up with Guideline, employers and employees will have a direct relationship with Guideline. This means that any ongoing support questions related to plan administration should be raised directly with Guideline via their online portal.

If there are any technical or data sync issues that the employer raises to you, please reach out to Check's Support team or your Check contact. These will be handled internally by Check's Partnerships team.