Check your pay stub with AI

To check your pay stub with AI, add the stub to Era's Document Library and ask Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini to go through it. Era reads the gross pay, taxes, deductions and net pay, keeps the line each figure came from, and your assistant explains what changed since the last stub.

How do you analyze a pay stub with AI?

Upload the stub by link, so the assistant never handles the file itself, and Era extracts the pay period, the employer, gross pay, each tax and deduction, and net pay. Then you ask in plain words. The answer comes from the extracted values, each with its page and snippet.

A pay stub is a small document with a lot of arithmetic in it, which is exactly the kind of thing worth a second pair of eyes. Ask "Do the deductions add up to the difference between gross and net?" and you get a line-by-line answer, not a guess.

What can Era read on a pay stub?

Era reads a pay stub as a paystub, one of the document kinds it extracts, so it picks up the pay period, earnings, taxes withheld, benefit and retirement deductions and the net deposit. Where the stub shows year-to-date totals, those are read too, which lets your assistant check the running figures against your own records.

The same library handles the W-2 you receive in January, so a year of stubs can be checked against the form that summarizes them. That is a useful cross-check: if the year-to-date figure on your last stub of the year and the wages on the W-2 disagree, you will know before you file, not after.

How do you spot a payroll mistake?

Ask your assistant to compare stubs and to explain every line that moved. A changed tax withholding, a missing deduction, an overtime hour that didn't arrive or a retirement contribution that stopped are all visible when two stubs sit next to each other with their figures extracted.

Prompts that work well:

Use Era. Compare my last two pay stubs line by line and explain every difference in dollars.

Use Era. Is my 401(k) contribution the same as on my January stub? Show me the lines.

Use Era. Does the net pay on this stub match the deposit that reached my checking account?

That last one joins the stub to the transaction in your bank account, which is where an assistant connected to Era is most useful: the paper and the money are in the same place.

Can your assistant remember your pay?

Yes. Promote the facts you want kept, such as your salary, your pay frequency and your retirement contribution, and they join Era's memory. Every connected assistant can then answer from them, so a budget built in ChatGPT uses the same take-home pay you confirmed in Claude.

Facts you promote carry on from there. When a raise arrives and a new stub confirms it, you promote the new figure, and the older one is retired. Your assistants stop planning around a salary that is out of date.

Who else can see your pay stub?

Only the people you choose. A stub stays in your own space, and you can place it in a shared space with a partner if you plan the household budget together. A share link for anyone else opens only for a signed-in Era user and expires after the lifetime you set.

Tags are your existing tags, so stubs can sit with a tag like "income 2026" next to your bank statements. See pricing for what each tier holds, and is it safe to give AI your financial data for how Era treats access.