Davis-Bacon certified payroll for controllers

On a covered federal or federally assisted construction contract, laborers and mechanics are paid at least the prevailing wage and fringe on the wage determination for the classification of work they actually perform. Pay is at least weekly. For each week of covered work, the contractor submits a certified payroll and a signed Statement of Compliance.

Optional Form WH-347 is the usual layout. Your own form is allowed if it carries the same information and the same certification. The field-by-field version of that layout is in What Form WH-347 is.

Most shops in this seat are subcontractors with 5 to 80 people, not general contractors with a certified-payroll department. The prime still has to collect your payroll. You still have to be right before you send it.

The wage determination is the Department of Labor schedule of classifications, basic hourly rates, and fringe for the county and the construction type. It is incorporated into the contract. Certified payroll reports what you paid. It does not choose the rate.

Someone in the shop, usually the controller or the project manager, has to read that determination and map each worker to a classification. If a needed classification is missing, conformance is a separate request through the contracting officer. It is not a column you invent on the WH-347.

PayCert does not search wage determinations, and it does not tell you whether a rate is high enough. You type the determination number onto the header so the reviewer can see which schedule you claim to have used. The number is not checked against DOL.

The painful step is usually the grid, not the signature. Rebuilding daily straight time, overtime, cash fringe, and itemized deductions into WH-347 columns the night before a prime contractor cutoff is where weeks slip.

• Payroll runs in Excel, QuickBooks, or Gusto on the shop's normal cycle.
• Someone exports the week and reshapes it into the PayCert CSV. Direct connections and automatic column mapping are not available.
• Job fields are entered for the project: contract number, location, wage determination, and the person who will sign.
• The review copy is checked against the source payroll and against the wage determination.
• The signer signs. The file goes to the prime or the agency in the format they specified.

QuickBooks and Gusto are payroll systems. PayCert is not one of them, and it does not log into them. If the export columns do not match the template, the importer stops. That is intentional. A guessed column map is a good way to put overtime in the wrong box.

The certification is yours. The Statement of Compliance says the payroll is correct, that workers received the full wages earned, that deductions were permissible, and that rates and fringe met the wage determination for the work performed. A software review copy does not move that responsibility.

Walk the pre-submit checklist against the printout. Pay particular attention to split classifications, apprentice status, cash fringe versus a plan credit, and any deduction that is not a tax. Those are the lines that do not fall out of a normal payroll export.

Keep payrolls, basic records, and the contract documents for at least three years after the prime contract is complete. Keep full Social Security numbers and contact details in those records. Leave them off the weekly transmittal. The weekly copy needs an identifying number, not the whole personnel file.

PayCert stores the current draft in this browser. That is not a record-retention system. Download or print the review copy into the job file you already keep.

PayCert maps a template CSV onto a print-ready WH-347 review copy and checks that the file is internally consistent. Free covers one project and two payroll runs a month. Pro is $49 a month or $399 a year for unlimited weekly runs and multiple projects. A $29 pack covers four runs with no subscription. Details are on the pricing section.

It is a form assistant for that weekly grid. It is not LCPtracker, not a payroll provider, and not a wage-determination search engine. You can watch the demo or run the sample payroll before you reformat a real export.