Certified payroll

What it is

On covered public works jobs, prevailing wage laws, the federal Davis-Bacon Act and the state laws that mirror it, require contractors to pay set wage and fringe rates by trade classification and to prove it. Federal jobs file weekly; states set their own schedules. The proof is certified payroll: a report for each job and each week listing every worker who worked on it, their classification, hours by day, rate of pay, fringe benefits, gross wages, deductions and net pay, with a statement of compliance signed by the contractor. The federal form is the optional WH-347, which carries the required information; agencies and states have their own forms, and many take electronic filings.

Why it matters

Certified payroll is produced per job, not per company, and it has to agree with what was actually paid. A contractor running public and private work in the same week has to split the hours, apply the right rate table to the public hours and file on time for every covered job. Done by hand, that is a weekly retyping exercise from timesheets into a form, and the errors show up in audits.

How Aquifer fits

In payroll and time, a job is flagged as prevailing wage and certified payroll turns on for that job alone. Each week’s WH-347 lists every employee who worked it with their trade classification, hours, rates and fringes, drawn from the same approved timesheets and pay run, so the report agrees with what was paid. Union rate tables, fringe benefits by agreement and prevailing wage rates by job are part of the module, and public and private work run in one system.