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How Jacobs Telephone Contractors Turned a Two-Day Certified Payroll Process Into 30 Minutes

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Industry

Telecommunications and Low-Voltage Infrastructure

Challenge

When Jacobs Telephone Contractors took on one of the largest contracts in company history with Ohio State University, the job carried new certified payroll obligations at both the state and federal level. Payroll professional Stephanie Furrow was producing those reports by hand, keying data that already lived in the company's payroll system into two sets of forms every week.

Results

Connecting Certified Payroll Reporting directly to Jacobs Telephone Contractors' ADP Workforce Now account replaced 14 hours of weekly manual entry with a 30-minute process, recovering 728 hours and $11,712 annually while eliminating the transcription errors that come with duplicate data entry.

Key Product

Certified Payroll Reporting

$11,712
Annual Savings
728
Hours recovered each year
10 yrs
As a Points North customer
35%
yearly time saved from reporting

“This solution is excellent; it speaks for itself. In the 10 years I have worked with it, I’ve only had to call with questions a couple of times. It is extremely well built, and with the integration, it gives me my Fridays back to focus on my employees and what matters— their safety and benefits.”

Stephanie Furrow

Payroll Professional, Jacobs Telephone Contractors

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About Jacobs Telephone Contractors

Jacobs Telephone Contractors is a family-owned contractor specializing in phone and internet cabling installation. A significant share of the company's revenue comes from government contracts, which makes prevailing wage work, and the certified payroll reporting that follows it, a permanent fixture of how the business operates rather than an occasional hurdle. As the company has pursued larger public projects, the speed and accuracy of its compliance reporting has become directly tied to its capacity to keep bidding and winning.

The Challenge

A Landmark Contract with New Reporting Obligations

Jacobs Telephone Contractors had done public works jobs before, but the Ohio State University contract was different in scale. It also came with a reporting requirement the company had not faced at this volume: certified payroll reports filed for both the state of Ohio and the federal government, each with its own format and its own submission expectations. Responsibility for producing them fell to a single payroll professional already running everyday payroll operations for the full workforce.

Fourteen Hours a Week of Manual Entry

The reports themselves were not complicated. The volume was. Every week, Stephanie Furrow pulled wage, hour, classification, and fringe benefit data out of ADP Workforce Now and re-entered it by hand into certified payroll forms for two separate agencies. The process consumed two full working days each week, 14 hours weekly and 28 hours per payroll period, and every figure that moved between systems by hand carried the risk of a transcription error on a report requiring a certified professional's signature.

For a family-owned business, that time represented a meaningful share of total administrative capacity. It also came at a cost that did not show up on any invoice: the work Stephanie was hired to lead, employee safety programs and benefits administration, kept losing to a data entry task.

 

The Solution

Rather than looking for ways to make manual entry faster, the Points North team looked at removing the handoff between systems entirely.

Direct ADP Workforce Now Integration Certified Payroll Reporting was connected to ADP Workforce Now, the payroll platform Jacobs Telephone Contractors was already using. Report data now flows directly from the system of record, with no export, no re-keying, and no reconciliation between the two.

Automated Multi-Agency Report Generation Both the state and federal certified payroll reports generate from the same integrated data set, in the formats each agency requires, within minutes of payroll being processed.

Error Elimination Through a Single Source of Truth Because report data is pulled straight from payroll rather than retyped, reports reflect what was actually paid. The most common source of certified payroll error, human transcription, was removed from the process.

Support That Stays Out of the Way Over a decade of use, the system has required only a handful of support calls, a reflection of both the stability of the integration and the responsiveness of the team behind it.

 

The Results

The integration delivered immediate time savings and a reporting process that has held up across ten years of projects and payroll cycles.

  • Weekly certified payroll time dropped from 14 hours to 30 minutes, a reduction of roughly 35% of Stephanie's annual working hours
  • 728 hours are recovered each year and redirected to employee safety and benefits work
  • $11,712 in annual savings flows directly to the company's bottom line
  • Manual entry errors were eliminated by sourcing all report data from the payroll system
  • Federal and state reporting requirements are met from a single integrated process, alongside compliance statements, no-work reports, and fringe benefit reporting
  • The solution has required only occasional support contact across a decade of use

 

Why Points North

Certified payroll is one of the few administrative obligations where doing the work faster is not the same as doing it better. Reports carry a certification, formats vary by agency, and every manual step between the payroll system and the filed report introduces a place for something to go wrong. Speed and accuracy have to come from the same change.

Certified Payroll Reporting connects to the payroll platforms contractors are already running, including ADP Workforce Now, and generates federal, state, and municipal reports from that data without re-entry. For a family-owned contractor without a dedicated compliance department, that integration is the difference between certified payroll consuming a role and certified payroll being a step in a process.

The Points North team builds around how each customer's payroll actually runs, rather than asking the customer to build around the software. For Jacobs Telephone Contractors, that meant a solution that has needed almost no attention in ten years, which for a business of their size is exactly the point.

Ready to Get Your Fridays Back?

See how Certified Payroll Reporting connects to the payroll system your team already uses, generates federal, state, and municipal reports in minutes, and removes manual data entry from certified payroll altogether.

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