Most wage lawsuits in New York aren't won by proving a worker was underpaid. They're won by proving the employer can't produce a piece of paper. Under Labor Law §195 (the Wage Theft Prevention Act), every employer must give each worker a written notice of their pay terms — and keep proof the worker received it.
For cleaning, security, and construction companies with high headcount and turnover, this is where the exposure lives: notices for workers hired years ago, in the right language, with acknowledgments you can still produce today.
What the notice must contain
The rate of pay and the basis (hourly, salary), the overtime rate for non-exempt workers, how the worker is paid (weekly, biweekly, and so on), the regular payday, the employer's official name and any DBAs, and the employer's physical and mailing address and phone number.
It must be given at hire and whenever the information changes — a raise means a new notice. And it must be provided in English and in the worker's primary language when the state publishes a template for it, which includes Spanish.
The part everyone misses: acknowledgment and retention
The worker must sign an acknowledgment that they received the notice — electronic acknowledgment is acceptable when the worker can view and affirm it — and the employer must keep that signed notice for six years. Damages for missing notices run $50 per worker per workweek up to $5,000 per worker in private actions, before attorneys' fees.
Six years of paper for a crew of a hundred, across rate changes, is exactly the kind of record that gets lost in a filing cabinet or a departed manager's laptop.
What a defensible system looks like
Notices generated automatically at hire and on every rate change, in English and Spanish. A signature the worker can't repudiate — in StockPoint's case, the worker's personal PIN entered at the kiosk or portal, timestamped, with the device recorded. The exact PDF the worker saw stored alongside a cryptographic fingerprint, retained until you choose to delete it. And a daily pay portal, so no worker can plausibly claim they didn't know their rate.
None of this replaces your employment attorney — pay frequency rules for manual workers, exemption calls, and template review are theirs. What software does is make sure that when the letter arrives, the evidence exists in thirty seconds, not thirty days.