Paylocity has grown into one of the most common payroll and HCM platforms among mid-sized American employers, so its stubs appear steadily in screening files for applicants who work at companies large enough to outsource payroll but not large enough for enterprise suites. Genuine Paylocity-generated stubs typically foreground the client employer's identity, itemize earnings and withholdings in structured tables, and pair current-period figures with year-to-date columns. As with every processor, the client employer's configuration shapes the final appearance, and formats shift over the years—so no memorized “Paylocity look” should be treated as a standard, and no departure from it should be treated as evidence.
The two standing cautions govern everything here. First, an immaculate stub is not authenticated by its own tidiness: one internally consistent document is within reach of a careful forger, which is why decisions with real consequences should escalate to independent employment verification. Second, a rough-looking stub is not incriminating: employees photograph screens, print at odd scales, and forward compressed files, while mid-year corrections and benefit changes produce genuine anomalies in the numbers themselves. Each check below exists to convert vague unease into a specific, documentable question you can put to the applicant or resolve through escalation.
A polished pay stub is not proof of authenticity. Unusual metadata is not proof of fraud. Every signal here is a reason to ask a better question—never a verdict.
What a genuine Paylocity pay stub typically contains
Treat the following as commonly observed traits of genuine Paylocity-generated stubs—employer configurations differ and layouts evolve, so deviations are routine and prove nothing alone. What separates real payroll output is the way its numbers interlock: totals, rates, and accumulations that agree with each other everywhere they touch:
- The client employer's name and address typically lead the document, with Paylocity identified in some configurations and only implied by structure in others; employee identifiers appear nearby, usually masked.
- Pay-period start and end dates are printed with a separate check or pay date, and mid-market cadences—biweekly and semimonthly prominently—repeat with calendar regularity.
- Hourly earnings rows show rate, hours, and an amount equaling rate times hours, with overtime, PTO, and supplemental pay carried on distinct labeled rows.
- Taxes appear as separate lines—federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and state or local lines where relevant—apart from benefit deductions and retirement contributions.
- Nearly every earnings, tax, and deduction line pairs a current-period amount with a year-to-date amount, and the YTD side accumulates believably against the pay date's month.
- Net pay is explicit, reconciles as gross minus all itemized taxes and deductions, and often sits near a check or voucher number or a masked deposit reference.
- Self-service downloads are typically text-layer PDFs whose figures can be selected; a flat-image stub means a scan, photo, or rebuild, which removes several checks and raises the value of escalation.
Field-level checks anyone can run
1. Start from the strongest source
Ask the applicant to download the stub themselves from their Paylocity self-service portal or app and submit that exact file. First-generation PDFs keep the text layer and metadata the later checks need; photos and rescans discard them. Never accept or request the applicant's login credentials.
2. Pin the file with SHA-256
Fingerprint the submission the moment it arrives and keep the hash with your file notes, so the reviewed document is identifiable beyond dispute. Ocolta's free scanner produces this digest locally in the browser without uploading anything.
3. Balance gross against net
Sum the earnings rows, subtract every tax line and every deduction line, and demand exact equality with the stated net pay. Fabricators who inflate an earnings figure routinely leave taxes and net contradicting it—this single equation catches a disproportionate share of careless edits.
4. Prove out each earnings row
Multiply rate by hours on every hourly line and compare with the printed amount; overtime should reflect a coherent premium over base. Salaried period amounts should be stable across consecutive Paylocity stubs unless a raise or proration explains the change—ask when it does not.
5. Run the YTD ledger test
Year-to-date is a running ledger: this stub's YTD must equal the prior stub's YTD plus the current period, line by line, and can never decrease within a year. Even a single stub's YTD gross should scale sensibly with pay periods elapsed by the printed pay date.
6. Gauge withholding percentages
Social Security commonly withholds 6.2% of Social Security taxable wages up to the annual wage base, Medicare 1.45% throughout. Because pre-tax benefits shift the taxable bases below gross, anchor your arithmetic to the taxable-wage figures the stub itself shows before treating deviation as significant.
7. Test cadence against the calendar and the bank
Biweekly pay dates advance fourteen days at a time; semimonthly dates cluster on fixed days of the month. Verify the stub's dates obey the claimed rhythm and, where bank statements accompany the application, that payroll deposits match net amounts and pay dates within normal settlement lag.
8. Trace check and voucher numbers
Across sequential stubs from the same employer, Paylocity check or voucher references should progress consistently. Numbers that repeat on distinct pay dates or run backward between adjacent periods are precise, documentable anomalies—exactly the kind worth citing in an escalation request.
9. Study the digits under zoom
At 400% magnification, examine net pay, gross, and the YTD column for baseline wobble, weight inconsistencies, or numbers escaping the column's right edge. Machine-set output is uniform; retouched digits usually are not. Compare any suspect numeral with its twins elsewhere on the page.
10. Match employer identity end to end
Employer name and address should be consistent across the stub, the application, and any independent source you check, and a printed EIN should fit the XX-XXXXXXX pattern. Mid-market companies sometimes pay through a differently named legal entity—one clarifying question usually resolves it.
11. Read the metadata story
Creator and producer fields, timestamps, and incremental revisions sketch the file's history. An editing suite as producer, or modifications long after creation, on a stub presented as a fresh Paylocity download justify requesting the original—while remembering that printing and merging create identical artifacts innocently.
12. Challenge wall-to-wall round numbers
Percentage-based taxes and prorated premiums scatter odd cents across genuine payroll. A stub in which gross, every withholding, and net all land on round dollars fits template output better than processed payroll and deserves corroborating documents before it supports any decision.
What Ocolta’s free scan checks automatically
Several of the checks above are mechanical, and mechanical work belongs to software. Ocolta’s free Integrity Scan runs entirely in your browser—the file never leaves your device—and reports the supported signals it can actually observe: whether the declared file type matches its binary signature, which software the PDF says created and produced it, creation and modification timestamps, incremental revision pointers, embedded scripts or attachments, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact file you reviewed. For paystubs it also recomputes the core arithmetic—gross pay minus deductions against net pay—and explains benign causes to consider for each observation. The PDF tamper checker runs the structural subset on any PDF. Every result keeps “unable to determine” on the table; the scan never claims a pay stub is authentic or fraudulent.
When to escalate beyond file review
File review narrows questions; it does not answer the last one. For material decisions, verify employment through an authorized verification service or via a documented call to the employer's HR or payroll office using contact details you obtained independently—never the phone number or email printed on the stub, which a forger would control. Log the date, contact, and facts confirmed. Operate from a written policy, apply the same criteria and sequence to every applicant, and have legal counsel review before document findings contribute to an adverse action.
When the file itself deserves a deeper look before you escalate externally, Ocolta’s AI Deep Review ($5 per document, no subscription) asks a model to organize fraud-risk and AI-generation indicators—evidence locations, confidence, benign explanations, limitations, and next checks. It reports observations, not verdicts, and it can return “unable to determine.” See pricing for 5-review and 25-review packs.
Frequently asked questions
Can Ocolta tell me whether a Paylocity stub is fake?
No tool can determine that. Ocolta's free scan runs locally, examining structure, metadata, revision history, and the stub's arithmetic—net reconciliation, rate-times-hours, YTD chaining—and reports supported observations, including an explicit unable-to-determine outcome. It never declares authenticity or fraud, and it does not contact Paylocity or the employer.
What is the fastest first check to run?
The recomputation pair: gross minus all itemized taxes and deductions must equal net pay exactly, and every year-to-date figure should exceed its current-period figure by an amount plausible for the pay date's month. Two minutes of objective arithmetic outperforms any amount of squinting at logos.
Is unusual metadata proof that a Paylocity stub was doctored?
No. Genuine stubs are printed, rescanned, merged into packets, and passed through document tools, each of which rewrites metadata. Anomalies justify one thing: a request for the employee's fresh self-service download. They never justify treating the applicant as a fraudster on their own.
Two applicants from different companies both submitted Paylocity stubs that look different. Is one fake?
Not on that evidence. Paylocity's client employers configure their own output, so genuine stubs from different companies routinely differ in layout, labels, and branding—and formats also change over time. Compare each stub against its own internal math and its own employer's other documents, not against each other.
Do not tell an applicant that a document is “fake” based on file review alone. State the observation, request the same follow-up your written policy requires in comparable cases, apply consistent criteria to every applicant, and preserve an unable-to-determine outcome. Obtain legal review before using document findings in an adverse decision.