Turn your pay stub into answers
Pay stubs are hard to read. Abbreviations you've never seen, lines that don't add up, and no easy way to know if something is wrong. TakeHome IQ's pay stub scanner turns that confusion into clarity — snap a photo and every line is decoded, explained, and compared to your projected paycheck.
Whether you work overtime one week and not the next, pick up extra shifts, or see your deductions change mid-year, your pay stub tells the story. The scanner helps you read it.
How it works
Four steps from confusion to clarity:
- Snap a photo. Open TakeHome IQ and use your phone camera to capture your pay stub — paper or digital.
- Every line decoded. The scanner reads your stub and identifies each line: gross pay, federal withholding, state tax, FICA, deductions, and net pay. No more guessing what “OASDI” or “Med EE” means.
- Compare to your forecast. Your scanned stub is matched against your TakeHome IQ paycheck projection. If there's a difference between what you expected and what showed up, you see it immediately.
- See what changed. If your net pay moved from last period, the scanner highlights which lines shifted — and by how much. Overtime hours, a deduction adjustment, a withholding change — the answer is right there.
What you see
The scanner extracts and decodes every major section of your pay stub:
- Gross pay — total earnings before anything is taken out
- Federal income tax — withholding based on your W-4 and IRS tables
- State income tax — withholding based on your state's rules
- Local tax — city or county withholding, if applicable
- Social Security — 6.2% up to the annual wage base
- Medicare — 1.45% on all wages, plus 0.9% above $200,000
- Pre-tax deductions — 401(k), HSA, health insurance premiums
- After-tax deductions — Roth 401(k), union dues, garnishments
- Net pay — what actually hits your bank account
- YTD totals — running sums that track wage base caps and annual limits
Your data stays on your phone
Your pay stub contains sensitive information — your name, your employer, your earnings, your Social Security contributions. TakeHome IQ processes your stub image in real time and does not store it on our servers after processing. No cloud uploads. No account required to scan. Your paycheck data stays on your device.
Read more about how we handle your data in our privacy policy.
More than a decoder
Decoding your stub is just the starting point. TakeHome IQ gives you the tools to understand and verify what you see:
- Audit trail. Every withholding and deduction shows the intermediate calculation steps — annualized wages, bracket lookup, per-period amount — so you can see exactly how each number was derived.
- Line-by-line breakdown. Your scanned stub lines are matched to TakeHome IQ's own projection, showing where they agree and where they differ.
- Compare scanned stub to your projected paycheck. If your employer withheld more federal tax than expected, or your 401(k) contribution looks off, the comparison surfaces it. You see the gap, the dollar amount, and which input to check.
For a full walkthrough of every pay stub section, see our guide on how to read a pay stub.