Whether you are looking for new payroll software or trying to improve your current one, there are ten features every contractor’s payroll software should include:
- Timesheet Entry. A payroll system must be flexible, allowing seamless integration with third-party timesheet software. Timesheet software is required to report and track equipment and materials while enabling the collection of crew, job and employee information.
- Multi-state, Multi-locality, and Multi-job Processing. To save time, the software needs to automate the various tax rates, deductions and pay rates for different locations. To understand where labor job costs are accumulated, various trade classifications will need to be used for workers on multiple jobs.
- Job Cost and General Ledger Integration. Contractors manage job costs by integrating payroll data with general ledger and job cost accounting modules. Payroll software has to automatically track the labor costs related to a specific job and determine the net profit of a job.
- Certified Payroll. To generate certified payroll reports such as prevailing wage and a statement of compliance, employees’ fringe benefits needs to be allocated and accrued.
- Equal Employment Opportunity reports and Benefit/Deduction Reporting. If automated, the Equal Employment Opportunity reports can instantly provide the number of employees on a job, minority workers and minority hours. Deduction reports have to be automated while customizable to allow users to define how deductions are tracked.
- Date-sensitive/historical Reporting. The ability to pull data from any time period to create job history reports is important for doing internal and external audits or for employee and job analysis.
- Standard Payroll Reports. In construction, payroll software must be able to automatically create pre-check minority compliance, certified payroll, and federal and payroll tax reports.
- Security Controls. Security features are essential to protecting confidential salary information. Basic security features such as controlling user access and tracking user activity can become very useful to any organization.
- Direct Deposit. Many payroll software products produce a file that can be sent to the bank or uploaded on the bank’s website. A direct deposit is convenient for employees and is a contractor’s cost efficient and low risk means of payment.
- Distinguish Between Costs. For the purpose of keeping a general ledger, construction payroll software distinguishes between employee costs as workers move from location to location and performs direct, indirect, or general and administrative labor costs.
Source: Ode, Mike. “Ten Payroll Features Essential to Construction Accounting Software”. Construction Technology
To receive all of the latest construction payroll tips and insight, subscribe to the Digital Time Capture Blog today. Or follow us on Twitter.