Payroll & Certified Payroll

Standard Payroll, Costed Correctly

Even on jobs with no prevailing wage requirement, payroll needs to be split correctly between billable field labor and non-billable time, with the right burden rate — payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits — applied per hour so job costing reflects the true cost of labor, not just the wage. We handle federal and state payroll tax filings, W-2s and 1099s, and new-hire reporting as part of standard service.

Certified Payroll and Davis-Bacon Compliance

For federally funded work covered by the Davis-Bacon Act, or state prevailing wage laws that mirror it, we apply the correct wage determination for each job and classification, track fringe benefits as either cash or bona fide plan contributions, and generate the weekly certified payroll report your contract requires — WH-347 for federal work or the applicable state form. Apprentice-to-journeyman ratios get tracked against the job so you stay compliant without having to monitor it manually.

This is one of the areas where a generalist bookkeeper's unfamiliarity turns into real project risk: an incorrect wage determination or a late certified payroll submission can hold up a draw, trigger a compliance review, or in serious cases put a contract at risk. We treat certified payroll as a compliance deadline, not an afterthought.

Union Reporting

If you're a signatory contractor, we handle union payroll reporting and benefit fund remittances on the schedule your agreement requires — hours, wages, and fringe contributions reported correctly by classification and local, with the paper trail your union and any auditing agency expects.

Payroll and Job Costing Work Together

Payroll data feeds directly into your job costing, so labor burden shows up correctly in job profitability reports without a separate manual step. This is part of why we prefer to run payroll ourselves where possible — when it sits with a disconnected provider, job costing has to reconstruct labor allocation after the fact, which is slower and more error-prone.

Multi-State Payroll

Electrical contractors who follow work across state lines — a commercial general contractor that operates in multiple states, or a specialty niche like solar or EV charger installs that takes you outside your home territory — end up with multi-state payroll tax obligations that a generalist bookkeeper often misses until a notice arrives. We register and file in each state where you have employees working, and track state-specific prevailing wage rates separately, since they can differ meaningfully from the federal Davis-Bacon rate on the same job.

Apprenticeship Program Tracking

If you run a registered apprenticeship program, prevailing wage jobs typically require apprentices to be paid at the correct percentage of journeyman wage for their program year, and ratios between apprentices and journeymen on a job site are enforced and auditable. We track apprentice program year and the associated wage percentage as part of payroll, so certified payroll reports reflect the correct rate automatically instead of requiring a manual lookup every pay period.

Working With Your Existing Payroll Provider

If you're committed to a payroll provider you already use, we can work alongside them — pulling payroll reports into your job costing, reviewing certified payroll submissions for accuracy before they go out, and flagging wage determination or fringe benefit issues before they become compliance problems. It's not our preferred setup, but it works, and we'll tell you honestly if the arrangement isn't giving you clean job costing.

Audit Readiness

Certified payroll on federally funded or state prevailing-wage work carries real audit risk — the Department of Labor and state labor agencies do review certified payroll records, and the contractor bears responsibility for accuracy even when a bookkeeper prepared the report. We keep the full backup for every certified payroll submission (wage determinations used, fringe benefit calculations, hours by classification) organized and retrievable, so if a job is selected for review, the documentation is already in order rather than needing to be reconstructed under a deadline.