Understanding the Compliance Library

What it is

The Compliance Library is a set of pre-built compliance forms authored by Onboarded. You reach it from the Form Library tab on your forms list, or from the Compliance Library card on the new-form page, where it's described as "Browse pre-built, industry-standard compliance forms."

Once a library form is in your account, its detail page tells you where it came from. The Source field reads Onboarded Compliance Library for library content and Organization for forms your own team built. Open the edit panel on a library form and you'll see the same signal: "This form originated from the Onboarded Compliance Library."

If you remember nothing else: the library is Onboarded's content, not yours. You can't publish your own forms into it. Adding library content is an internal Onboarded surface. Your side of the relationship is browsing, previewing, and pulling forms in.

Why it matters

Withholding forms are the highest-volume, least differentiated compliance work in onboarding. Every account that hires across state lines needs them, and none of them are a place to be creative. The library covers federal withholding, state withholding, some city-level withholding forms, and state notices — browse it to see what's currently available rather than assuming a specific form is there.

Understanding the library also decides something you'll live with for a long time: whether a form in your account stays tied to Onboarded's copy or becomes yours to maintain. That's a one-time choice at the moment you add it, and it determines who is responsible when a state revises the form.

How it works

Who can browse it

Access depends on your organization's connect type. Onboarded has three: standard, platform, and connected. A connected account is a child account that sits under a parent platform account.

• standard and platform accounts can browse the library.

• connected accounts cannot. The Form Library tab and the Compliance Library card are both hidden, and the API refuses the request outright with "You do not have permission to access forms library."

Connected accounts aren't cut off from library content — they just don't shop for it themselves. They see forms that were shared with them on their My Forms tab. A platform account sends forms down to its connected accounts from each form's Connect tab, separately from the policies that assign them. See 📄 How do I distribute a form to connected accounts?

Bringing a form into your account

Clicking a row on the Form Library tab opens an Add Form panel — "Review and configure your form before adding it to your account." From there you can hit Preview Form to walk the form the way an employee would see it, then Add form to bring it in. If you want several at once, select the rows with their checkboxes and use the Add N Forms button.

Forms already in your account show a green check on the library list and can't be selected again. Some library forms carry an integration that has to be configured before the form can be added — the panel asks for that configuration first.

Subscribe, or add as a template

This is the decision that matters. The Add Form panel defaults to a subscription: your account references Onboarded's version of the form, and stays connected to it.

Flip Add as template and you get an independent copy instead. Onboarded's own wording for the toggle: "a separate copy of this form will be added and will not receive future updates or version upgrades." Because it's now your form, you name it — and the name has to differ from the library form's name.

Two practical limits. Some library forms are template-only, and the toggle is forced on. And you can hold only one subscription per library form, so if you already have one, adding the form again means adding it as a template.

Update preferences on a subscription

When you keep the subscription, you also set how updates land. Auto-update to new versions takes Yes or No. If you choose Yes, Upgrade existing tasks decides what happens to work already in flight: None, Only Unstarted, or All Incomplete. You can revisit both later from Update Preferences in the form's edit panel.

Reviewing an update yourself

Setting Auto-update to new versions to No doesn't cut you off from Onboarded's revisions — it puts you in charge of when they land. New versions still arrive, and they wait for you on the form's version list behind a banner: "This form has new released versions. Please review the changelog below and upgrade." The banner lists each new version with its release notes, offers Preview Latest so you can walk the form first, and an Update button to take it.

Taking an update from the banner asks the same in-flight question the subscription setting does, worded a little differently — Upgrade tasks to use this version?, with Do not upgrade any tasks, Only upgrade incomplete tasks that have not yet been opened, and Upgrade all incomplete tasks. Completed tasks are never upgraded, whichever option you pick. Once you upgrade, all new tasks in that mode are created under the new version, and that part can't be undone.

Example

Take an account that hires across California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. On day one there's no reason to build federal or state withholding forms from scratch — the HR Engineer opens the Form Library tab, filters by name and tags to find the withholding forms for those states, previews each one, and adds them.

All of them come in as subscriptions with Auto-update to new versions set to Yes and Upgrade existing tasks set to Only Unstarted. Employees mid-way through onboarding keep the version they started on; anyone who hasn't begun gets the current one. When California revises its form next year, that account gets the revision without touching anything.

Say that account also drives a downstream system from one of those forms and wants eyes on every revision before it ships. That one form gets Auto-update to new versions set to No, and the HR Engineer takes each new version from the changelog banner once they've previewed it — still subscribed, just on their own schedule.

Later the same account needs one extra internal question added to one of those forms. That one gets re-added with Add as template under a distinct name, and from then on it's the account's form to maintain. The others stay subscribed. Each form on the detail page still shows Source: Onboarded Compliance Library, since that's where the lineage started.

Policies have their own separate catalog at /policies/library with an Add from library action — same idea, different object.

Read next

• 📄 How do I distribute a form to connected accounts?

• 📄 How do I deploy a form version to test or live mode? — for the task-upgrade choices in detail

• 📄 Understanding forms

• 📄 How do I generate form fields from a PDF with AI? — for when the library doesn't have what you need

• 📄 How do I distribute a policy to connected accounts?