Wingspan overview

Use this page to learn what Wingspan does and where to start with the V3 API.

Wingspan is a payments and compliance platform for companies that pay independent contractors, vendors, and other workers. You can use it to onboard the people you pay and collect the documents and verifications you need before paying them. Use it to pay those people and keep the records you need at tax time. Contractors use Wingspan to get paid, send invoices, and manage their own payout methods.

You can run Wingspan from the web app, from your own systems through the API, or both. A few features, such as 1099 filing, are in the web app but not yet in the V3 API. This documentation says so wherever that applies.

What you can do with Wingspan

Job	What it looks like in Wingspan	Where to read more
Onboard the people you pay	Create a payee record, invite them by email, and let them link it to their own Wingspan Account.	Payees, Invite a payee
Gate payment on documents and checks	Attach requirements (tax verification, signatures, insurance, licenses, background checks, custom documents) to an engagement. A payee can be paid through that engagement once its requirements are complete.	Requirements and eligibility
Pay contractors	Create payables, approve them, and pay them one at a time or in a payroll run.	Payables overview, Payroll runs
Get paid	Contractors and businesses send invoices to the companies that pay them.	Invoices overview
Stay current on what happened	Subscribe to webhooks, and recover anything you missed from a 30-day event log.	Webhooks overview
Run Wingspan inside your own product	Create child Accounts for your customers and act on their behalf with one set of credentials.	Parent and child Accounts, Acting on behalf of Accounts
Work from an AI assistant	Connect Claude or another MCP client to look up contractors and payments and create draft payables in a conversation.	Wingspan MCP
Prepare for tax season	1099 filing is available in the Wingspan web app.	1099 overview

Important: The V3 API endpoints for tax filings (/v3/compliance/tax-filings) and for issuing and filing tax forms aren't available yet. Use the Wingspan web app for 1099 filing, and contact support if you need API access to it.

How the V3 API is organized

Every V3 endpoint starts with /v3/ and one of five domains. If you know what you're trying to do, the domain tells you where to look.

Domain	What lives there	Examples
`/v3/payments`	Money movement and the parties to it	payees, payers, engagements, groups, payables, invoices, payroll runs, deductions, payouts
`/v3/finance`	Bank accounts and bookkeeping for an Account holder	external bank accounts, transfers, internal accounts, cards, transactions, tax withholdings
`/v3/onboarding`	Identity verification and requirements	onboarding status, verification, requirement definitions, payee requirements
`/v3/compliance`	Documents and files	vault files, signature requests, insurance, background checks
`/v3/platform`	Identity, access, and plumbing	persons, accounts, API keys, service accounts, sessions, webhooks, events, batches, operations

There is also /v3/search, a read-only set of search rows over payees, payers, invoices, and payables. See Search.

A few conventions hold on every endpoint, so you learn them once:

JSON field names are camelCase. Enum values are TitleCase, such as Opened or PaymentInTransit.
Money is a decimal number (1250.00), and the document carries its currency.
Changing a resource's state is a POST to a verb, such as POST /v3/payments/payables/{payableId}/open. You never set status in a PATCH.
Errors use one shape everywhere, and you branch on its code field.
Creates and money movement take an Idempotency-Key header so a retry never creates a duplicate.

Request and response conventions covers these in detail.

Security and compliance

Wingspan holds Level 1 PCI Service Provider certification and is SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant.

Wingspan provides tools that help you run a compliant contractor program, such as tax verification, requirement tracking, and document storage. You remain responsible for your own worker classification and tax obligations. This isn't tax or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional.

Where to go next

Concepts: the objects you'll work with and how they relate.
Environments and authentication: get credentials and make your first call.
Quickstart: invite and pay a contractor: go from nothing to a paid payable.
Migrating from V1: if you already use /payments/collaborator and /payments/payable.