Income verification from pay stubs, W-2s and payroll data

Upload a W-2 PDF on its own or with a personal tax return. SpreadSpace extracts the employee and employer information, the tax year, wages, withholding and the other reported boxes so the reviewer can inspect the annual wage record. W-2s supplied in a payroll export enter the same review.

Keep each employer and tax year identifiable when comparing W-2 income. The annual record gives context for the current pay stubs and for the other income documents collected for the file.

Each pay period becomes its own record with the pay date, the period dates, the employee, the employer, gross pay, net pay and the year-to-date amounts when supplied. Itemized earnings and deductions stay with the record.

The paystub income table groups the records by month. Choose the years to review and keep employers on separate rows. Expand a month to inspect the contributing pay periods. A month with no supplied pay stubs stays blank, and the year-to-date row names the pay stub whose total it shows, so a gap in the records never reads as a reported zero.

Compare regular pay with overtime, bonuses, commissions and the other earnings the source identifies. Review itemized taxes and net pay beside gross income to understand the changes between periods.

Use the individual pay periods to explain a monthly movement. An extra payment, a bonus or a change in hours can move the comparison. Keep the pay dates and the coverage period beside the calculation and record how your institution treats variable income.

Where a figure is source-linked, open its supporting page. For an uploaded W-2, that is the document page. For a payroll export, SpreadSpace renders a labeled page from the supplied data. A monthly total opens into its pay stubs before those figures are followed to their sources.

Income reconciliation connects records that describe the same earnings from different angles. Start with the same person, employer and period, then compare like amounts. Gross pay, taxable W-2 wages and net deposits each describe a different measure.

W-2 box 1 reports taxable wages and generally excludes traditional 401(k) elective deferrals, so a difference from payroll gross can have a documented explanation. Use the underlying earnings and deductions to explain it before carrying an income figure into the analysis.

Compare pay stub to pay stub for the same employee and employer. Match the W-2 to its tax year and employer. Review net pay against the deposits on the bank statement, allowing for pay dates and amounts split across accounts. Check how much of the year the supplied pay stubs cover, since a year-to-date total is not another pay period.

Mortgage income verification needs both recent earnings and a historical wage record. Reviewing pay stubs and W-2s together lets the underwriter follow changes in employer, pay and the mix of regular and variable earnings, under the documentation standards of the program the loan is written to.

For microloans and smaller loans that rely on employment income, the same review focuses on who pays the applicant, what arrives in a typical period, what varies and what the supplied documents cover. When a small-business borrower also earns wages, read that income beside the business financials and keep each source tied to the person or the entity it belongs to.

Embed the SpreadSpace workspace in your loan origination system so the team reviews income records and their sources where it manages the loan. Period comparisons, source review, comments and the memo workflow keep the review connected to the wider analysis.

For a custom interface, the API lists the extracted pay stubs and the standalone W-2 documents by borrower and returns each record on its own.