Around the Clock: How Plane Automated Global Employee Onboarding Document Verification

~90% faster verification · Up to 24 hrs saved per submission · 100+ document types

Plane is a global payroll and HR platform that helps companies hire, pay, and onboard employees all over the world. Every new international hire comes with a stack of onboarding documents that has to be collected and checked: tax forms, IDs, proof of address, bank details, social security records, insurance enrollments. Each one needs to be complete, valid, and tied to the right person before payroll can run.

Champ runs that work behind the scenes. When a new hire uploads their paperwork, Champ figures out what each document is, groups the ones that belong together, checks them against the rules for that person's country, and reports back to the team. Nobody has to wait for the right reviewer to come online.

Every Country Has Different Rules

International onboarding is hard because the rules change at every border. A Canadian hire needs TD1 and TD1-BC tax forms checked together. An Indian hire submits an Aadhaar card and Provident Fund forms. A German hire needs a tax class, a social security ID, and a new hire form. A driver's license might show up as two separate images, front and back, that only make sense when you read them together. Plane hires in a lot of countries, and each one has its own document types, completion rules, and expiry dates. Getting it right takes real context.

For Plane's team, the goal was simple: review each submission as soon as it came in, no matter the applicant's time zone. Someone in Asia would upload their paperwork while the reviewers in Europe and the Americas were asleep. By the time anyone looked and caught a problem, a full day was already gone.

"If someone is in APAC and the majority of us is in Europe or America time zones, when they submit something, we don't get to see it until we get on. And if we discover something is wrong with the documents and have to give them instruction, then we have to wait for a whole other day for them to respond."

Irene Chao, VP of Operations, Plane

And the wait was only half of it. Every submission meant someone opening each file one by one, working out what it was, and checking it by hand against that country's requirements. That added up to hours of the team's time.

What Plane Needed

There's no room to be sloppy with onboarding documents. A misread expiry date, a name that doesn't match, or a missing signature can hold up a hire or open a compliance gap. So Plane needed automation that could:

1. Handle every country's document rules without a person stepping in at each step
2. Be accurate enough to trust on legal and tax documents, matching names, checking dates, and confirming nothing is missing
3. Close the time zone gap so applicants hear back the moment they submit, not the next day

How the Workflow Runs

When a new hire uploads their paperwork, Champ takes it from a pile of raw files to a checked, ready-to-decide submission on its own. It works out which documents belong together, reads each one in the context of the employee's country, and only looks at what that country actually needs.

Then it checks every document against the right standard: is it legible, is it in date, does the name match the record, and are the fields and signatures there. Each one comes back marked approved, needs review, or rejected. Instead of opening every file by hand, the team gets a short summary they can act on for each new hire.

All of this happens inside the tools Plane already uses, so nobody had to learn a new system. Champ integrations with tools like Google Sheets, Dropbox, Front, and sends the verification summaries to the team over email.

The Outcome

The biggest win was not having to think about time zones anymore. Champ checks documents the moment they are uploaded instead of whenever a reviewer happens to log on, so applicants find out right away if something is missing or wrong. No more waiting eight hours for someone on the other side of the world to wake up and look.

"It pretty much cut the time for reviewing the documents, and really helps us not have to worry about time zones. Since it can identify anything from the time it's uploaded, it can just send them the email right away with instructions on what needs to be completed. So there's no waiting like eight hours until someone else is on to review it. I'd say that's the major impact."

Irene Chao, VP of Operations, Plane

The second win was the review work itself. The team no longer opens and inspects every file by hand.

"The team doesn't really have to review all the documents individually, clicking individually just to review those."

These days the workflow just runs, and Plane's onboarding lead reviews the results.

Looking Ahead

Onboarding document checks were the starting point, not the end. As Plane has come to trust the system, they have handed Champ more of their operations work, from pay stub verification to payroll TPA (third-party administrator) checks that confirm whether a customer's tax accounts are active, closed, or carrying a balance across states. It is the same accuracy-first approach on a wider set of back office work.

The idea behind all of it is the one that drives our work everywhere: run your operations on AI first. The way Plane sees it, there is a long list of back office work like clicking, matching, and moving documents that an AI agent can take off the team's plate, so people can focus on the work that actually needs them.