Payroll for crews that change size every single week.
Multi-crew payroll, job costing and equipment depreciation for contractors.
Payroll that keeps up with the crew
Construction payroll is harder than office payroll for structural reasons. Crew size moves with the work. Overtime is calculated on the workweek and has to be handled correctly when the pay period splits it. Shift and hazard differentials belong in the regular rate. And a portion of the workforce is often paid as subcontractors, which is where the largest single financial exposure in the trades lives.
Worker classification is the item we push hardest on with contractor clients. A crew member you direct, schedule and supply is an employee regardless of what the invoice says. Getting that wrong creates liability for back withholding, employer FICA, unemployment tax and penalties across multiple years, and it typically surfaces through an unemployment claim rather than an audit.
Job costing that matches the P&L
The most common complaint we hear from contractors is that the financial statements say the company made money while it never seems to be in the bank. That gap is almost always a job costing problem. Labor is posted as a lump payroll expense, materials are coded to a single account, and subcontractor costs are never tied back to the job that consumed them.
Configured properly, your accounting file shows margin by job. That changes bidding, changes which customers you keep, and makes the year-end conversation about strategy instead of archaeology.
Equipment and depreciation timing
Equipment-heavy businesses have a lever most owners use badly. Section 179 and bonus depreciation can shift substantial tax between years, but only when the purchase decision accounts for it. Buying a machine in January versus December of the prior year is a materially different tax outcome.
That means the equipment conversation happens in the fall, with a projection in hand, not in March when the decision is already history.
The January 1099 scramble
Contractors who pay subcontractors owe 1099-NEC forms, and the information needed to issue them, a completed W-9, is easiest to collect before you pay the first invoice and nearly impossible to collect in January.
We build the collection into the bookkeeping workflow so January is a report rather than a phone campaign.
Talk through your construction & trades payroll
Bring your last return and a payroll register. We tell you what we would change and what it costs. No charge, no obligation.