Certified Payroll Solution from Sunburst Software Solutions

Sunburst Software Solution’s Certified Payroll Solution © is a 3½ year old add-on program, designed for contractors or subcontractors who perform work on federal or state funded construction projects which fall under the Federal Davis-Bacon or state specific prevailing wage laws, and use QuickBooks for their normal accounting and payroll functions.

Prevailing wage laws require contractors and subcontractors to submit reports each week to the agency that awards or manages the contract. These reports are called Certified Payroll Reports and Statements of Compliance. The federal government requires that you complete Form WH-347 Payroll Certification and Form WH-348 Statement of Compliance. In addition, 21 states have their own specialized form(s) derived from these standard forms. Additionally, “No Work” payrolls must be submitted whenever there is a temporary break in the company’s work on the project.

If you use QuickBooks for payroll, completing these forms is a very tedious, time-consuming, and MANUAL task. You must first determine which employees to include on the form, and then collect the following information: what work classifications the employee performed work under while on the jobsite, how many hours are worked each day at each different classification, the rate of pay for that classification, the corresponding fringe benefit rate, the gross pay for each job, the gross pay for all jobs, all applicable payroll withholdings, the net pay for the week, and then complete the forms.

After gathering this information, the alternatives for preparing these reports, are either (1) purchasing a stand-alone software product and reentering data, or (2) creating a cumbersome spreadsheet and entering the required data each week. This causes contractors to spend a great deal of extra time and effort duplicating data entry, increasing the risk of errors.

The good news is… there is now a better solution. With Sunburst Software’s Certified Payroll Solution, you can prepare federal and/or state specific certified payroll reports, statements of compliance, “no work performed” payrolls, six different EEOC/Work Utilization reports, two standard or a customized Union “bona-fide” plan fringe benefit reports that are ready to be signed and mailed almost automatically from basic information entered in QuickBooks employee records, timesheets, and paychecks.

Data File Setup Issues In order to successfully use the Certified Payroll Solution, a few changes may be necessary in your QuickBooks data file.

For example:

1. The client should be preparing payroll weekly in QuickBooks using the Do-It-Yourself service or the Assisted Payroll.
2. The primary (or general) contractor must be listed as the customer name, and all the jobs must be listed under that customer name in the QuickBooks customer:job list.
3. There are a few data elements that are required on the certified payroll forms such as the project’s “number,” “name,” and “physical location.” Certified Payroll Solution requires that this data be entered in the “ship-to” field on each job record.
4. In some instances, a more detailed Payroll Item List must be created. For example: if the contractors labor force is comprised of a Foreman, a Laborer and an Equipment Operator, separate hourly payroll items must be created for each classification, thus allowing a single employee to work on one job with multiple classifications. This ensures accurate tracking of hours by work classification, which is required to be reported on the Certified Payroll reports.
5. QuickBooks employee records must be edited, and the new payroll items must be added to the Payroll and Compensation section with that particular employee’s rate of pay when he or she performs work for the selected classifications.

Certified Payroll Solution stores other information not available from the QuickBooks transactions in its own database. You’ll set up this information the first time you use Certified Payroll Solution and it stores all this information for your future reports. For example, you’ll set up information on each employee such as Union affiliation, most often used work classification for use in EEOC reporting, and race. For job’s you will set up the job project numbers, awarding authorities, and original bid amounts. Payroll wage items are then assigned to work classification that will print on the certified payroll report; users must indicate whether a payroll item is used for straight time or overtime hours. All payroll deductions must be categorized by type of deduction. For example, a child support deduction should first be classified as an “Other Withholding” and then further classified as child support for proper inclusion on the reports.

After the paychecks are created in QuickBooks, you can use Certified Payroll Solution to prepare the reports. The software uses the Intuit Software Development Kit (SDK) to access the QuickBooks file on a “read-only” basis. This is an important consideration because it ensures that your client’s payroll data won’t be modified by the program. The Certified Payroll Solution program retrieves the payroll information based on the pay period ending date and the date of the paycheck transactions and then formats the data onto the exact forms required by the various government agencies. All you need to do is print and file the reports.

Although you’ll need to do a bit of setup to make this solution work well with QuickBooks, the timesavings and costs of preparing certified payroll reports will quickly pay you back the purchase price of $375.00 many times over. In addition, the error-prone alternative methods make the purchase of the Certified Payroll Solution a no-brainer for anyone required to file certified payroll reports, prevailing wage reports, or other state-specific reports required by government agencies.

For more information on this solution, contact Sunburst Software Solutions at www.sunburstsoftwaresolutions.com