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Certified Payroll and AIA Billing Solutions from Sunburst
With a busy construction season just getting underway now would be a good time to
contact your construction clients, talk about their upcoming needs, and possibly resolve
any pain points before they get too out of control.
Many contractors struggle to find a quick, accurate, and reliable method of
generating certified payroll reports and AIA billings as well as deal with frequent
pay rate changes. These same clients have already come to rely on QuickBooks Pro, Premier,
or Enterprise Edition's powerful financial features, which provide an ideal accounting solution,
but lack some of the higher-end functionality of construction specific software. Sunburst
Software Solutions, Inc. has tapped into the power, flexibility, and ease of use of QuickBooks
with its comprehensive, yet easy to use, family of products: Certified Payroll Solution (CPS),
Construction Application for Payment Solution (CAPS), and their newest product - Wage Manager
Solution (WMS).
Certified Payroll Solution (CPS) saves tons of time for your construction clients who perform
work on any sort of federal and/or state funded construction projects, from buildings to road
construction, and are required to submit Certified Payroll Reports under the Federal Davis-Bacon
Act or state specific Prevailing Wage Laws. Your clients might refer to these types of jobs
as certified payroll jobs, Davis-Bacon wages, prevailing wage jobs, or certified jobs.
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 WH-348 Statement of Compliance. In addition, 21 states have their own specialized
form(s) derived from these standard forms. Additional mandates include the submission of “No Work
Performed” payrolls whenever there is a temporary break in the company’s work on the project.
If your clients use QuickBooks for payroll (Do-It-Yourself, Enhanced, Enhanced Plus, or Assisted Payroll)
processing that actual payroll checks is a very easy process; however, 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 classification(s) 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 employee for each job
- The gross pay for each employee for all jobs
- All applicable payroll withholdings
- The net pay for the week
- Complete the forms
After gathering all the required 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. Either of these options
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 a better solution. With Sunburst Software’s Certified Payroll
Solution, your clients can prepare federal and/or state specific certified payroll reports,
statements of compliance, “no work performed” payrolls, eight different EEOC/Work Utilization
reports, two standard customizable Union or “bona fide” plan benefit reports, create their
own customized Union/bona fide plan benefit reports and, by using the built in Wage Manager
Solution, effectively deal with numerous employee pay rate changes that often accompany
these types of jobs.
Certified Payroll Solution 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 the program will not modify the QuickBooks payroll data. 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 into the exact forms required by the various government agencies.
Construction Application for Payment Solution (CAPS) will be a perfect
fit for contractors, developers, builders, and remodelers who are required to
submit contract billing based on percentage of completion following the American
Institute of Architects (AIA) billing requirements by which the contractor can apply
for payment due on work he has completed to date and the architect can certify that
the work was indeed completed and that payment is due to the contractor.
Typically AIA billing consists of two forms:
- The G-702 Contractors Application for Payment which is a summary of the
information being submitted on the Continuation Sheet and requires the contractor
to show the status of the construction contract to date. This summary includes:
- The amount of the Original Contract
- Net Change by Change Orders
- Contract Sum to Date
- Total Completed and Stored to Date
- Retainage on Completed Work
- Retainage on Stored Material
- Total Retainage to date
- Total Earned Less Retainage
- Total Earned Less Retainage
- Current Payment due
- Balance to Finish including Retainage
Additionally a summary of Current and Previous Change Orders is required to be shown
– indicating if the Change Orders were an Addition to or a Deduction from the Original
Contract Amount and if they were a Current or Previous Change Order. This document
must be signed by the contractor and notarized prior to submission.
- The G-703 Continuation Sheet breaks down the contract sum into multiple
line item portions or segments of the work in accordance with a Schedule of Values
required by the General Conditions of the Contract. The Schedule Values are
the amounts that were bid for each portion of the contract and should be used
consistently throughout the project, using multiple pages when necessary.
While QuickBooks does an adequate job of Progress Invoicing for most purposes it
is simply incapable of putting the information into the required format, so after
gathering all the required information, the alternatives for preparing these billings,
are either (1) purchasing a stand-alone software product and reentering data, or
(2) creating a cumbersome spreadsheet and entering the required data each month.
Either of these options causes contractors to spend a great deal of extra time and
effort duplicating data entry, increasing the risk of errors.
With Sunburst Software’s Construction Application for Payment Solution, your
clients can prepare plain paper versions of the G-702/703 or opt to print the information
on AIA Original Copyrighted G-702/G-703 or the G-702/G-703 CMA versions. Additionally
CAPS handles Fixed or Variable Rates of Retainage calculations, Retainage Billing,
Sales Tax Distributions, Credit/Negative Applications for Payment, and a Contract
Document Manager containing 30+ common contract document templates that can be customized
to suit the needs of the company; provisions have been included to create specialized
contract documents and complete AIA Copyrighted G-706/706-A and G-707/707-A forms.
Construction Application for Payment Solution 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 the program will not modify the QuickBooks Accounts
Receivable data. The Construction Application for Payment Solution program retrieves
the billing information based on the QuickBooks Progress Invoice dates or numbers.
Wage Manager Solution (WMS) has been designed for Business Owners, Payroll
Administrators, QuickBooks ProAdvisors, and accountants who deal with frequent employee
pay rate changes or set up numerous client data files. Wage Manager allows you to import
and view QuickBooks Employees, the payroll wage items and the pay rates that are
currently assigned to them in a convenient spreadsheet type layout. After the
information is pulled into Wage Manager you can create new Payroll Items and Pay Rates,
modify existing payroll items with new rates or remove obsolete payroll items assigning
the changes to one or multiple employees within the grid, writing the information back
to QuickBooks with the click of a button.
Wage Manager allows for fringe benefit and shift differential calculations, allowing
you to copy an existing payroll wage item: creating items for straight time, overtime,
double time, and triple time all at the same time while. Additionally you can
choose to work with single or multiple payroll wage item types – i.e. only Hourly Rates,
Commissions, Salary items or any combination of these. Wage Manager solutions uses the
Intuit Software Development Kit (SDK) to access the QuickBooks file on a “read, write,
modify” basis, and while it can delete an obsolete payroll item from an employee’s record,
it follows existing QuickBooks business rules and cannot delete the payroll item from
the Payroll Item List.
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