The Challenge
Government and school system contracts brought steady work but also imposed prevailing wage obligations. As the company grew, the process for meeting those obligations did not scale with it.
Multiple job classifications in a single day. Installers in the field perform a mix of tasks. Some must be paid prevailing wage; others (general work in the shop, driving between locations) do not. The team needed a way to categorize each task and document the exact time spent on it, without slowing crews down.
Handwritten timecards across a mobile workforce. Field employees documented their hours on paper. Someone then had to key that information into a spreadsheet and upload it into ADP® to run payroll. Then separately fill out prevailing wage forms so they could be signed and submitted to general contractors or government agencies.
No path from time data to reports. Time had to be documented in 15-minute increments, and employees traveled to as many as six locations in a day. That meant VP of Finance, Susan Simonton, was preparing six separate reports for a single employee. Across multiple states, some pay periods produced as many as 16 reports per employee.
Different requirements in every state. Agencies formatted their reporting requirements differently from state to state, adding preparation time and creating room for error on every submission.
Compliance work crowding out finance work. When a report was late or information was missing, Simonton had to set aside her actual responsibilities to catch up or troubleshoot. The paperwork was consuming time that should have been spent on financial leadership.
The Solution
Simonton brought her frustrations to her ADP Workforce Now® sales representative and asked whether an integration existed to address them.
- An integration, not a replacement. Rather than moving away from a payroll system that had worked well for 15 years, Curtis Restaurant Equipment connected Certified Payroll Reporting to its existing ADP Workforce Now® environment and added QuickBooks Time for field time tracking.
- Time tracked where the work happens. Installers now capture time by job classification from the field, in the required 15-minute increments, with each task tied to the correct site. The paper timecard and the spreadsheet that followed it are gone.
- Payroll data flowing into reports automatically. Employee data and paycheck values move from ADP® into Certified Payroll Reporting each pay period, populating prevailing wage reports without manual re-entry.
- State requirements built into the output. Rather than reformatting reports agency by agency, the system produces reports in the formats required by the receiving agencies and general contractors.
"On a personal level, I get to do more work in the financial area where I want to be, rather than the paperwork area. It's a total win/win/win!" Susan Simonton, VP of Finance
The Results
The integration saves Curtis Restaurant Equipment more than $18,000 a year. That figure accounts for the cost of all three software solutions, and the time recovered still outweighs it. For a company that is 100% employee-owned, where everyone has a direct stake in how the business runs, that kind of efficiency gain is felt across the staff.
Time is now categorized correctly at the source, and payroll data feeds directly into reports. The company stays in compliance more reliably than it ever did on paper. General contractors and agencies receive accurate, timely certified payroll reports on every project. Meanwhile, the hours Simonton once spent assembling up to 16 reports per employee go toward the financial leadership work her role was meant for.
Ready to Get Your Prevailing Wage Reporting Under Control?
See how Curtis Restaurant Equipment replaced handwritten timecards and manual forms with an automated process that saves more than $18,000 a year. If you're already running ADP®, Points North integrates with what you have.
"We are saving so much time and money... It's a total win/win/win!" — Susan Simonton, VP of Finance
