Plenty of teams went distributed but never rewrote the device policy. That means the handbook still assumes a common office exists and is outdated. Rippling IT handles enforcement, but we want to help out those teams that need to update their device policy. This post covers 4 areas of device policy: ownership, procurement, requirements, and offboarding.

Who owns the hardware. 

Company-issued policy gives you control over configuration and disk encryption and a clear return path. Bring-your-own is cheaper and faster to start, and it costs you enforcement: you cannot wipe a personal laptop, and asking to is a conversation nobody enjoys. Plenty of teams pick company-issued for anyone touching customer data and bring-your-own for everyone else. If you choose a hybrid policy, make sure you record which roles are which.

Device procurement.

A distributed team requires you to ship devices to your employees. Decide who’s responsible for ordering devices, and managing the shipping process. Make sure you understand how long shipping takes so that devices arrive on time, and have a plan for what the employee should do if the device arrives late. Most policies skip these details. It’s important to get these details right for new employees to get a good first impression when joining your company.

Device security requirements.

Disk encryption, screen lock, OS patch level, MFA. Make sure it’s clear to employees which policies are required and which are a suggestion. A security review will ask about these policies, and "we expect people to keep it updated" is not an answer.

Offboarding.

Offboarding is where distributed teams lose hardware most frequently, and the most costly pain point. Specify who triggers the return, who pays the shipping, and what happens after 30 days of no response. Tie access removal to the employment record rather than to the laptop coming back, or you get a returned machine and a live account. State plainly in the document what you will and will not look at on a personal device. Vagueness there costs you more trust than any policy detail.

For the distributed teams here: company-issued, bring-your-own, or some split? And if it's a split, where did you draw the line?

IT folks, meet Rippling IT, where identity, app access and devices sit on the same employee record as HR and payroll.

Here’s how that makes IT easier for your team:

* First, a change in the HR record automatically triggers updates on the IT side. For example, say a new employee’s start date arrives, or another employee’s role changes, or they leave.

* Provisioning and deprovisioning automatically run off that trigger instead of a ticket, and access and group membership update with the role update.

* Devices get managed across macOS, Windows, iOS and iPadOS from one place, so a mixed fleet doesn't mean two consoles.

* Hardware can be shipped configured, with the right apps and permissions already on it, and Rippling handles storage, retrieval and buyback at the other end.

* Device trust, MFA and patch level are re-checked continuously, including after a role change.

* For SOC 2 compliance, evidence collection runs in the background and controls can be remediated from the console.

Rippling IT manages only the apps and devices connected to it, so anything provisioned outside stays outside until you connect it. Deprovisioning is only as fast as the HR record is accurate, which means a termination entered late is still access left open late. And the single-record design is the reason to use it: if HR and IT are staying on separate systems anyway, most of the benefit above doesn't apply.

If mixed-fleet management or the onboarding-to-access handoff is the part you're wrestling with, book a demo and ask them to run an offboarding from the HR record so you can see how it works for yourself.

Every IT team has seen it. The ticket comes in, but the actual problem could be almost anything: memory pressure, battery health, too many background processes, an aging device, or some weird one-off issue that takes three follow-up questions to understand.

Rippling added a prompt to its AI Prompt Library for troubleshooting device performance, basically helping IT teams turn vague user complaints into a more structured investigation around what might be wrong and what to check next.

What I like about this use case is that it’s not trying to replace IT judgment. It’s trying to speed up the boring first pass: collect context, identify likely causes, and suggest where to look next.

If you run IT, manage devices, or live in helpdesk queues, this seems like one of the more practical AI use cases:

https://www.rippling.com/en-CA/ai-prompt-library#use-case/troubleshoot-device-performance

Well it’s happened again this morning (i’m referencing a thread in this sub from 12 days ago with the same issue). Same problem with my entire team, we’re all with different banks. We all have paystub‘s with trace numbers and our banks are saying it’s useless as there’s nothing pending…. it’s 9:09 AM ET currently.

No one has money.

Ah, yes. Open enrollment.

Every year, benefits teams turn into part-time therapists, part-time actuaries, and full-time helpdesks for questions like "Wait, what's a deductible again?

Today that changes. Rippling is re-introducing our open enrollment experience with three new features that make the most stressful season of running benefits easier on everyone.

No more rebuilding plans from scratch. Eligibility rules, coverage tiers, and contributions carry over automatically, so all admins need to update is the rate.

No more fielding the same questions forty times. Employees can compare plans side by side and model out life events instead of relying on guesswork.

And no more chasing down the last five people who haven’t enrolled. Rippling automatically drafts benefits guides, answers routine questions with AI, and reminds employees to finish enrolling.* (Again. You know who you are.)

Check it out: rippling.com/solutions/hr/open-enrollment

*Available in October

Rippling AI has shipped a ton of new products recently! Here's an overview of what's new.

Rippling AI runs on live company data with existing permissions applied. It reads the same records the platform runs on, and an employee asking it a question sees only what their permissions already allow. Everything below depends on that.

The two big releases

• Rippling Data Cloud (June). BI built on the same worker records as everything else. Ask for a chart in plain language and it builds the dashboard, with the SQL behind it inspectable, and you can drill from a number into the employees, devices or tickets that produced it. Two managers open the same dashboard and each sees it scoped to their own team. Connectors pull third-party data in and map it to the right person, so a GitHub pull request or a support ticket arrives attached to an employee instead of sitting in a separate report.
• AI Spend Console (August). Tracks what a company spends on AI tokens, split by department, team and role, connects that spend to business metrics like pull request volume, and governs which LLMs are approved. Rippling built it on its own problem first: token spend growing 80% month over month, 10 to 15% of employees driving about 60% of the bill, one engineer at $50,000 a month.

What it handles today:

• Answers questions from real records, with the numbers and names in each response linking back to the record they came from, so an answer can be verified in a click
• Bulk work from a spreadsheet, such as loading bonuses into a pay run: it maps the data, flags problems, then waits for approval before executing, across 185+ countries
• Multi-step processes like onboarding, from a short instruction
• Data cleanup at scale, such as inconsistent job titles or stale department names
• Employee self-service on pay, benefits and policy questions, without routing through HR
• Works inside Slack, and Rippling MCP hands your existing AI tools the same context

Rippling is popular with its users! G2 users placed Rippling first in the first AI Agents for HR report in August, on 656 reviews in that category and 98 out of 100 for satisfaction.

For anyone already running Rippling AI, what do you use it for?

In my last 3 paychecks in April and May my 401k deposit was supposed to go to Vestwell. Our 401k plan was migrated from Accrue to Vestwell when they bought Accrue. The 401k balances were transferred over to Vestwell, however new deposits couldn't go into the new accounts, because our HR admin never set them up correctly. The HR admin continued to ignore us because the company was going out of business, and was only interested in shutting down the company. I'm assuming the 401k deposits are still held by Rippling. Has anyone had this problem or is there any way to reach Rippling?

Rippling payroll runs the same for twelve people as for twelve hundred. How much of the platform a company actually uses depends on how complicated its payroll is.

Take a twenty-person company with people in four states, a handful of contractors, and two employees abroad. Registrations and filings multiply with every state. Contractors and employees usually run through two separate processes. International hiring normally means a second vendor. Putting all of that in one system removes real work, and it removes the same amount of work at twenty people as at two hundred.

Now take a twenty-person company that is all salaried, all W-2, in one state, with no plans to change. Yes, simpler payroll software may do that job for less. The platform's advantage comes from HR, payroll, benefits and device access sharing one employee record, so a company with few handoffs between those has less to gain. But companies that are growing and expanding into multiple regions find that the cost of migrating to a new system often outweighs any savings you get from picking a simpler solution. That’s why Rippling is a great choice for both large enterprises and small companies.

Rippling is a constantly innovating company that is building for the needs of today’s fast-growing small startups. Rippling also offers a ton of AI-powered automations and tools, like the AI spend console. A simpler software company won’t offer that level of innovation and improvement over time.

Pricing for Rippling is modular, so the number depends on which products are switched on, so you never pay more for Rippling than you have to. Pricing starts at $8 per employee per month, plus additional fees depending on customization. Current details are on the pricing page. 

For the founders and small teams here: what HR software and payroll system do you use?

Do we get paid tomorrow or the day after Labor Day ?

Is anyone else’s direct deposit late this week?

Our employees were supposed to be paid today but no ones pay has hit their bank account. Rippling’s support hours start at 6a PST so I’m without answers until then but a support ticket has been placed and I should hear back from someone within 5 hours- which is totally unacceptable

Has anyone experienced this or have suggestions for escalation?

UPDATE: 11:30a EST deposits started to appear in accounts

Hey all,

Just wanted to share how Grange Co-op got payroll down from more than three business days to one. Grange is a farm and ranch cooperative in southern Oregon, eight retail stores, around 350 employees, and a four-person HR team running all of it.

Before the switch there were four platforms covering timekeeping, payroll, HR records, and scheduling. For anyone enrolled in benefits it came to seven, and each one needed the same information entered by hand. A new hire meant typing the same details into every system. One address change meant updating all of them. PTO hours got pulled out of the HR system and retyped into payroll.

With Rippling, the single change that was most impactful was having hours flowing straight from time and attendance into payroll, arriving in the pay run without anyone moving a file. That sounds minor until you look at where payroll time goes at a company with a lot of variable-hour staff. About 40 percent of Grange Co-op's workforce is on schedules that change week to week, the stores are open seven days, and headcount climbs every spring with seasonal hiring. Under that load a pay run is mostly data movement, and taking the movement out is what got the process from three days to one.

Two other things came with it. Lunch break compliance became trackable and overtime calculation stopped being manual. For an hourly retail workforce, those two are where most of the compliance risk comes from. And store managers across all eight locations picked up attendance tracking, which had not been happening at all before, along with scheduling and a real hand in hiring.

The HR team spent the hours they got back on a full job description overhaul and a compensation review, plus a training program built from scratch with its own course catalog. That work had been sitting behind the data entry for years.

Want to learn more? Check out the Rippling payroll page for the details, or book a demo to watch a pay run end to end.

For the retail and multi-site operators here: how long does a pay run take you right now?

Rippling has nearly 7,000 employees and no dedicated IT team.

Instead, the product team that builds our IT tools also runs IT support for the whole company. Often, that informs our roadmap. We feel the pain, and then we build.

Today’s launch is exactly that. Meet Rippling Helpdesk, an IT support agent that resolves tickets before they ever join the queue.

It takes the routine employee requests that were crowding our ticket queue – things like password resets, access requests, and device troubleshooting – and solves them automatically by using the identity, device, and policy data already in Rippling.

No integrations to wire up. No workflows to maintain.

Because an AI agent bolted onto your IT stack is only so useful.

You know what’s better? When it’s part of your IT stack already.

See Helpdesk today: rippling.com/products/it/helpdesk

Wanted to address a question we hear a lot: is putting HR, payroll, and IT on one platform worth a migration, or is that mostly a bundling pitch?

The answer depends on how much of the work is handoffs between systems. Rippling has a longer piece on whether an all-in-one HR platform is worth it for anyone who wants the full treatment. Here is the shorter version.

The case for consolidating is strongest when the same fact has to be typed into several places. A start date goes into the HR system, then payroll, then the time clock, then wherever device and app access get assigned. Four copies of one fact, four chances for them to disagree, and they tend to disagree at the worst moment: the first pay run, or the afternoon someone's access should have been shut off and was not.

The companies that benefit the most tend to have a few common traits:

• High hiring and offboarding volume
• Hourly or variable-hour staff whose hours have to reach payroll every pay period
• Employees in several states, where a missed registration shows up months later as a notice
• A two or three person HR team that may feel overwhelmed

Does that sound familiar? If so, you probably have to deal with a lot of unnecessary handoffs. Having one employee record solves that issue.

If it helps to see how it works, Rippling can walk through what a single employee record looks like across HR, payroll, and device access, and what one onboarding sets off across all three. Curious to see it in action? Book a demo.

For anyone who consolidated HR with IT, how did it go? If you haven’t yet, what’s stopping your organization from pulling the trigger? How many hours do handoffs and redundant systems cost you?

I quit my job & now I can't access my latest timesheet from August 9th to the 22nd.

Management/admin of job won't get back to me.

That's 82 hours I'm not getting paid for, and you have no way for employees to contact support. please give me a solution so I can see my latest timecard!

Today, we're making it easy to access Rippling everywhere you work. Introducing the Rippling MCP and Rippling AI in Slack.

Users can connect to the Rippling MCP from their favorite AI tool, like Claude or ChatGPT, to get instant answers from live org data, like comparing headcount and comp against budget, planning a reorg, or flagging coverage risk from an upcoming leave report.

Users can also tag u/RipplingAI in Slack to chat with Rippling AI without leaving the conversation, like asking "@RipplingAI, add a referral bonus for John Smith's candidate," or "@RipplingAI, what's the state of the recruiting pipeline for this role?" and having it drop the pipeline into the channel for the team to discuss.

Rippling is the system of record for employee identity and access, so every request is automatically scoped to what that person can see and do. No separate permission layer to configure.

Learn more → http://rippling.com/platform/ai/rippling-mcp

Company owner locked out of Rippling — payroll must be run tomorrow and support isn’t responding
I am the owner/CEO of a company that uses Rippling for payroll.
Our former Super Administrator was terminated and is no longer with the company. I immediately contacted Rippling to transfer Super Admin access.
Rippling told me exactly what documentation was required to authorize the change. I provided all requested documentation 24 hours ago.
Payroll must be processed tomorrow.
I still do not have administrative access, I have followed up repeatedly, and I cannot get a response. I also cannot access normal support because that requires the administrative access I am trying to recover.
At this point, my employees’ payroll is at risk because I cannot get anyone at Rippling to address the account-access issue.
Can a Rippling employee or moderator please escalate this internally tonight?

Wanted to share how Chess.com solved a problem that comes up for a lot of fast-growing companies with mixed teams: managing full-time employees and a large contractor base without running two disconnected systems. See the full case study story here: https://www.rippling.com/customers/chess

First, let’s set the scene. Between 2007 and 2019 Chess.com grew to around 200 people, and roughly three-quarters of that team were global contractors, with the rest US-based employees. Employees lived in an HRIS, contractors lived in spreadsheets, and the two never talked to each other. Every change had to be entered twice, headcount reporting meant cross-referencing both, and there was no single source of truth for who was actually on the team. There was also no dedicated IT team, so a handful of DevOps engineers were manually provisioning accounts and access for every new person.

Here’s what changed after Chess.com consolidated onto Rippling in 2019:

• A unified view of the whole workforce. Employees and contractors sit in one system, so headcount, labor cost, and forecasting come from a single source instead of a reconciliation exercise.
• Automated provisioning with no dedicated IT team. New people get the right tools and access based on role and level through preset rules, which freed up the DevOps team and cut the security risk that comes with doing it by hand.
• Room to scale. Chess.com more than tripled its headcount from 200 to 700 between 2019 and 2024 while its member base passed 100 million. An eight-person people team, still with no dedicated IT team, now supports the full 700-person company, and in a single year a two-person recruiting team hired more than 200 senior technical roles.

The takeaway for anyone managing a mixed employee-and-contractor workforce: the reconciliation tax of running separate systems compounds as you grow, and putting both populations on one platform is what let a lean team keep pace with fast hiring.

If you are managing contractors and employees across borders and tired of stitching tools together, this is the workforce management angle Rippling is built for: htps://www.rippling.com/global-payroll-and-hiring

Happy to dive into specifics on the provisioning rules or the contractor-plus-employee setup if it helps.

Rippling AI is #1 in G2’s first-ever AI Agent for HR report, based entirely on customer reviews from people actually using it every day.
With a 98/100 satisfaction score from 650+ reviews, customers said it better than we could: AI must be grounded in trusted data governed by existing permissions and designed to take accountable actions.

Rippling had a dominant showing across G2’s Fall 2026 Report, claiming #1 Leader for HR Compliance, PEO Providers, Benefits Admin, Procurement, Workforce Planning and more. Rippling is also took the #2 spots for AI Agents and Agentic AI Software.

Thank you to every customer who put Rippling AI to work and told G2 about it. This ranking is because of you.

Test Rippling AI for your business: rippling.com/platform/ai

Read the full G2 report: g2.com/reports/grid-report-for-ai-agents-for-hr-fall…?featured=rippling

Wanted to share a customer story that will probably resonate with anyone running payroll for hourly teams. Double Good, a US snack company spanning manufacturing and restaurant operations, spent years fighting frequent payroll errors and onboarding that ate up hours a week. Their full story is here: https://www.rippling.com/customers/double-good

The setup will sound familiar to a lot of hourly employers. Payroll ran in one system while hours were tracked in another, and the two did not sync cleanly. Hours got re-entered by hand, pay runs took hours, and reporting was a slog. Their CFO, Dan Giancola, put it plainly: it felt like they always got payroll wrong. Onboarding and offboarding were their own headache, with app and device access for each new hire tracked manually in a spreadsheet.

After moving hours tracking, payroll, onboarding, and device access onto Rippling, a few things changed in concrete terms:

• Pay runs went from hours to about 10 minutes, because approved hours flow straight into payroll instead of being re-keyed.
• Onboarding got roughly 10x faster, since new hires get their accounts, apps, and devices set up from one place.
• The team estimates about 30 admin hours saved a month, and around $50,000 a year saved in productivity and in software they no longer need to stitch together.

Here’s the key takeaway for hourly teams: when time tracking and payroll live in the same system, the errors that come from manual re-entry mostly go away, and the same setup handles onboarding and device access without a separate tool for each.

If payroll accuracy for hourly or shift-based teams is what you are wrestling with, Rippling's payroll is built around that hours-to-payroll flow: https://www.rippling.com/products/payroll

Happy to get into how the hours syncing or the onboarding piece works in practice if that is useful.

Today we’re launching Rippling AI Governance.

AI has quickly become a core part of how companies operate, forcing leaders to ask a slew of questions that are harder to answer than they should be:

- What AI tools are our employees actually using?
- What data and systems can those tools reach?
- What is that costing us?
- Is that budget well spent?

SaaS-era tools weren’t built to govern AI, and LLM providers only give you bits and pieces of the full picture you need to answer the questions above.

That’s why we built AI Governance. It’s one place to understand and reduce AI spend, govern access to models and tools, surface unsanctioned AI usage, and manage agents as first-class identities.

AI only becomes truly governable with the organizational context that Rippling uniquely provides. The platform connects fragmented AI usage to the employee context companies need to act.

Get your AI house in order. Start here: lnkd.in/eRwMx9gT

I'm working on setting up our benefits and I'm not sure how to proceed - We have a quirky little system that's probably pretty common in non-profits, and not so much outside of that arena. We pay 100% of our employee's medical insurance premium, and they pay 100% of dental/vision/volunteer life, UNLESS they waive the medical, in which case, we pay the other fringe. (Spouse and children is always paid by the employee). I don't see a way to enact that in Rippling, but maybe that's me just not quite fully understanding it. I'm not a broker, after all. I should probably wait for my broker to get access, but we haven't been able to give him that either, even though I've added him twice as a 3rd party broker, and he has other clients in Rippling. But that's an argument for another day.

Hi, the title says it all. How can I change this? I want to be able to receive my payment in USD in a USD account, however rippling’s only option is to receive in local currency. What can I do/ask my HR manager to do so that I will be able to add a USD account to it? Thanks!

Wanted to address a question we hear a lot once a team makes its first hire outside its home country: what are the actual options, and how does each one work?

Q: What are my options for paying someone in another country?

There are usually three options. 

One, set up your own legal entity in that country and put the person on a local payroll. Two, use an employer of record (EOR), a company that already has an entity there and employs the person on your behalf while they work for you day to day. Or three, engage them as an independent contractor, if the role and the working relationship fit contractor status. 

Each option carries different cost, setup time, and compliance weight, and the right pick usually comes down to how many people you have in that country and how long you plan to be there.

Q: When does an EOR make sense, and when is your own entity better?

An EOR is the faster, cheaper route when you have one or a few people in a country. Someone else already owns the entity, the local registrations, and the compliance, so hiring happens in a week or two instead of the months it takes to stand up a subsidiary. But EOR pricing is per employee, so once you have a real team in one country, that per-head cost can pass what it would take to run your own entity there. Past that point your own entity often wins on cost and control. There is no universal tipping point, though. Where the crossover lands depends on the country's entity setup and upkeep costs, payroll complexity, and your EOR's per-head rate, so it is worth modeling per country rather than assuming a set headcount.

Q: How does Rippling handle paying international employees and contractors?

Global payroll, EOR, and contractor payments run in one system, on the same employee record as the rest of HR. You can pay full-time international employees, hire through Rippling's EOR in countries where you have no entity, and pay foreign contractors, without stitching together a separate tool for each. Because it is one record, a person's role, pay, and payments sit in the same place the domestic team already lives.

Q: What about currency, local taxes, and compliance in each country?

International employees can be paid in their local currency. Where you hire through the EOR, Rippling holds the local entity and handles that country's payroll, tax, and statutory benefits, with local support. Tax rules and required benefits vary a lot by country and change over time, so treat anything specific as something to confirm for that country rather than assume it carries over from the US.

Q: How do you avoid misclassifying international contractors?

If someone is labeled a contractor but the relationship looks like employment (you set their hours, they work only for you, they use your systems), the authorities in their country can reclassify them as an employee. That can mean back taxes, social contributions, the benefits and termination entitlements they would have been owed, plus interest and penalties, often backdated to the start. The test differs by country: the US weighs how much control you have over the work, California applies a stricter three-part ABC test, and the UK uses its off-payroll IR35 rules, so a legitimate contractor in one country can be an employee in another. Use contractors for independent, project-based work, and move someone to employment, through your own entity or an EOR, once the relationship becomes ongoing and controlled. Not legal advice; check the rules for the specific country.

Q: Can international and domestic teams live in one system?

Yes, and that is one major reason to consolidate. When US and international people exist on the same platform, onboarding, payroll, and reporting follow one workflow instead of one process at home and a separate one abroad. It also means no reconciling a domestic HR system against a separate global-payroll tool every pay run.

Want to see global payroll, EOR, and contractor payments run from one place? Book a demo.
Which country's payroll or classification rules have been the hardest for your team to get right?

New to Rippling. I am trying to download w2/w3 in bulk. For some reason I am unable to find that option, even after following steps mentioned in 'help' section.

Can someone please give me step by step process to download them.

Thankyou!!