How many times have you had to grab timecards from three different jobsites before you can finish payroll? If the answer is more than once, that’s too many.
Time tracking and payroll software that only works from the office simply doesn’t work for a mobile industry like construction. Your workforce moves between job sites and projects span multiple states and jurisdictions, each with its own regulations.
HR and payroll tools not built specifically for construction are not ready for your reality. What’s worse, because they don’t understand your mobile workforce and complex regulations, noncompliance and errors increase with every payroll cycle.
You need HR and payroll software that is built with native compliance tools, giving you a single, mobile-ready platform to manage labor costs, tax filings, and regulatory requirements without manual reconciliation.
Most payroll systems are built for office-based workforces with predictable schedules and a single tax jurisdiction. We know construction does not work that way. Your crews might work a job in one county on Monday and a different state by Thursday, requiring you to adjust taxes; a huge burden without multi-state tax calculations. Your payroll also needs to understand the distinction between union and merit shops, and how worker hours and roles are coded. And contractors working on government-funded projects need accurate prevailing wage determinations, backed by certified payroll reporting. Nothing in this list is standard for industries that aren’t construction.
So instead of finishing up payroll on time, or even early, generic HR software forces payroll admins to manually stitch together spreadsheets like some Frankenstein creation. The problem with this is the likelihood of errors, which takes even more time and increases your compliance risk.
Your construction crews work in the field, not in front of a computer, which means field work compliance depends on time capture that happens where the work happens on a phone or tablet at the jobsite, with GPS verification tying labor hours to the correct project and location. Simply put, your time tracking and payroll tools need to be as mobile, flexible, and accurate as you are.
Case in point: when Arcoro Time (formerly ExakTime) captures accurate time data in the field, that data flows directly into Arcoro Payroll; no re-keying hours from a paper timecard or a disconnected app. Labor costs, job codes, and location data move with the crew, which means the payroll integration is doing the compliance work in the background rather than leaving it to a manual review at the end of the pay period.
Maintaining compliance in construction is absolutely essential. Not only are your finances on the line, but so is your reputation. Just to drive the point home, FLSA fines start at $1,000 per violation, misclassifying workers can lead to employment tax liability, and not adhering to certified payroll requirements can result in fines or losing your status as a government contractor. Being ineligible from working on public works projects cuts you out of a huge revenue stream.
But compliance is not just a legal obligation. It is a resource drain when handled manually. The right construction payroll solution, like Arcoro Payroll, automates tax filings and eliminates manual data entry between systems, which can save construction payroll teams as much as 10 hours a month. That time returns to HR and finance teams so they can focus on strategic work, or even leave early on a Friday, instead of chasing down filing deadlines and correcting entry errors.
There is also the benefit of understanding exactly where your finances are going. Payroll analytics connects payroll line-item data to location, job codes, and cost categories, giving leadership a clearer picture of labor costs by project. That level of detail supports better budget planning and helps construction companies catch cost overruns before they become a bigger problem.
Arcoro Payroll is purpose-built to navigate the specific regulatory demands construction companies face every pay period, including:
Because these regulatory compliance tools are integrated into the payroll platform itself, payroll managers are not layering a separate compliance checklist on top of their existing process. The compliance reporting is native to how payroll gets processed.
Construction HR leaders do not need another system that assumes a nine-to-five office workforce. You need software that understands certified payroll, prevailing wage, multi-state taxation, and union deductions as standard compliance requirements. You need mobile workforce management that captures accurate data at the job site instead of after the fact.
Ready to see how automated compliance and payroll can save your team hours every month? Explore Arcoro Payroll to learn more, or request a demo to see it in action.