Toast Payroll: Employees Without Email Addresses

• Can I add an employee to Toast Payroll if they don't have an email address?
• Can I onboard new hires without email addresses to Toast Payroll?
• Is it possible to create a Toast Payroll profile for a new hire that doesn't have an email address?

On the Basic info step of hiring a new employee in Toast Payroll, you have the option to select No for Will you provide an email address? But what happens after that?

Employees without email addresses will be unable to fill out their portion of new hire onboarding, so we highly recommend all employees have an email address, even if it's only to fill out Toast Payroll onboarding information and have access to their pay stubs and year-end documents like Form W-2s.

New hire onboarding includes:

• Filling out Form W-4 and section 1 of Form I-9
• Entering a payment method (typically a direct deposit account), and
• Reviewing any company documents that your company has uploaded for new hires.

An employer can fill out direct deposit information on an employee's behalf and also upload a paper copy of an employee’s Form W-4 and Form I-9, but Toast Payroll will not be able to read these directly from the upload. In the case of a paper Form I-9, this is ok as long as it’s filled out completely and correctly. Use these steps to upload the paper Form I-9 to your employee’s profile. 

On the other hand, Form W-4 (and any state or local equivalents) can be filled out by an employer by:

• Navigating to the employee’s profile > Taxes & Documents > Tax Forms.
• In the W4 Forms section, select the Fill Out State W-4 button and the Federal W-4 hyperlink (among any others that appear in this section).
  • Match the information directly from the employee’s paper Form W-4 to Toast Payroll.
  • This allows Toast Payroll to use the selected settings during payroll calculations.

We also recommend uploading the paper Form W-4 via the same steps as the Form I-9. Once this is complete, you can remove the employee from your onboarding dashboard (Team > Onboarding) by selecting the yellow edit button and choosing Mark this new hire as complete.

As a last step for total verification, verify the employee’s social security number on their profile for accuracy. Not doing so can risk inaccurate and/or incomplete tax filings along with associated penalties and fees.

If a new hire's email was entered incorrectly and Toast Payroll won't let you complete a rehire, this is usually because Toast Payroll matches employee profiles by Social Security Number — entering a duplicate SSN is blocked to prevent creating two records for the same person.

If you see an error like "There's an issue completing your profile information. Please reach out to your HR Manager for assistance," this typically means the SSN is already tied to another employee profile in the system. Because only Toast Payroll Support can unlink an email address from an existing profile, contact Customer Care and ask them to unlink the incorrect email. Once it's freed, you can enter the correct email and complete the rehire.