Landing a public works contract is a big win. And while being a government contractor is typically tied to higher paying projects, it comes with a lot more paperwork. Prevailing wage rates, certified payroll reports, and weekly filings all come with the territory, and missing a detail can mean penalties or back pay.

The good news is that payroll software built for construction can take most of that busywork off your plate. Here’s how Arcoro Payroll handles it.

Arcoro Payroll Automates Compliance

Faster Wage Determinations

If you win a government-funded project, the employees that work on that job must be paid a prevailing wage. Under the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts, laborers and mechanics on covered contracts must receive the locally prevailing wages paid as cash or a combination of cash and employer-provided bona fide fringe benefits, as determined by the Department of Labor. In short – you're held accountable for providing a fair wage.

To find that rate, your payroll admin pulls the project’s wage determination from SAM.gov and matches each published classification to the work your crew is doing.

That might sound easy enough for one worker; but now imagine finding prevailing wages for 30 workers who are all logging different cost codes, per job. Now, this simple task is eating up an entire day.

But not with Arcoro Payroll. We help cut that work down in a few ways.

Build once, use everywhere. Instead of building rate tables job by job, you build one per wage determination number (WDN) and link as many jobs to it as you need. Arcoro Payroll blocks duplicate WDNs, so you always know which table is the right one.

Let AI do the first pass. Enter a federal WDN, and the AI Rate Importer pulls the rates straight from SAM.gov. It suggests a labor class match for each published classification. You review every match and approve the import before anything saves, so you stay in control.

Stay current without checking SAM.gov yourself. Arcoro Payroll checks SAM.gov nightly and flags any published revision with a badge. When you approve a revision, it becomes a dated version, so each job keeps the rates it was bid on. Nothing changes until you say so.

Handle the edge cases. Need to pay a fringe shortfall as cash? You can. Have labor classes like shop fabrication that belong on the job for costing but not on certified reports? You can exclude them from reports and still keep them on the job.

The result is less retyping, fewer missed rate changes, a full audit trail when you need it-- and up to days of saved time.

Updated California Certified Payroll Reports

Getting prevailing wage right is only part of the process. Federal contractor compliance regulations also require you to submit certified payroll reports that prove you paid your workers the prevailing wage on public works projects. You do this by submitting Form WH-347 weekly to the US Department of Labor. Arcoro Payroll not only provides this data- we make the process easier for you in a few other ways:

Adhering to California compliance. California does not accept the WH-347 for state-funded public works, so Arcoro Payroll offers a CA eCPR (XML) format to the Certified Payroll report, alongside WH-347 PDF, WH-347 CSV, and LCP Tracker CSV, generating a schema-compliant file for one certified job and week from the payroll the customer already ran.

Set it up once. California company settings are entered once, and the PWC-100 Project ID and Contracted With are captured when a job is linked to a California pay rate table. The file won’t generate until required data is present, and it lists exactly what’s missing; every file is logged in Audit History.

You stay in control of submission. Arcoro Payroll generates the file, and you upload and certify it in eCPR.

More Arcoro Payroll Features

Custom tax withholding. Payroll admins can enter a specific federal or state withholding amount instead of the W-4 calculation, right inside the normal payroll workflow.

Check Activity Detail report. An itemized breakdown of every paycheck, including earnings, hours, rates, taxes, deductions, fringe contributions, and reimbursements, as a PDF or CSV.

Job costing for salaried employees. Salaried employees can log hours in Arcoro Time (formerly ExakTime) for job costing and GL allocation while still receiving their full salary.

Spend Less Time on Paperwork

Public works projects are worth winning, and the compliance work that comes with them shouldn’t eat up your week. Arcoro Payroll is built for construction, so it handles wage determinations, certified payroll reports, and job costing in the same place you already run payroll. You stay in control of every approval, and you get time back for the work that matters.

See how Arcoro Payroll simplifies certified payroll for your team.