Certified payroll rejections almost never come from bad intent. They come from a timecard that never captured the worker’s classification, or a laborer who spent Tuesday on the funded portion of a site and Wednesday on the private portion with nothing separating the two. Procore construction software can carry that detail cleanly, but only if the fields exist before the first crew clocks in. Retrofitting classifications onto three weeks of approved timecards is nobody’s idea of a good week.
What are prevailing wage and certified payroll?
Prevailing wage is the minimum hourly rate plus fringe benefits that must be paid to workers on covered public construction, set by trade classification and geography. Certified payroll is the weekly report proving you paid it, signed under a statement of compliance.
Under the Davis-Bacon Act, coverage starts at federally funded or assisted construction contracts over $2,000. Weekly payrolls must be submitted within seven days of the regular pay date, per 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii). Form WH-347 is the Department of Labor’s optional template, which most agencies accept. Contracts over $100,000 also pull in the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act, which requires overtime past 40 hours in a week at one and a half times the basic hourly rate, calculated without fringe amounts folded in.
The 2023 Davis-Bacon final rule changed how rates are determined and updated, and parts of it were vacated in 2024 litigation. Confirm the current regulatory text with the Wage and Hour Division rather than a summary written before those rulings.
Can Procore generate certified payroll reports on its own?
Procore is not a payroll system and does not produce a signed WH-347. It holds the source data those reports are built from: hours by worker, by day, by cost code, by classification, tied to a project.
Reports get generated in your payroll or accounting system, or through a certified payroll app connected via the Procore App Marketplace. Common pairings include LCPtracker, Points North, and eBacon, plus sync to Sage 300 CRE, Foundation, or Vista through middleware. Either way, the reporting tool inherits whatever Procore captured. If the classification field is blank in Procore, it is blank downstream.
How should you configure Procore before the first payroll runs?
Set the company workweek to match your certified payroll week, not your accounting week. If payroll runs Sunday through Saturday and Procore starts Monday, every report straddles two periods and needs manual repair.
Four other settings matter more than the rest:
- Add a required worker classification field on the employee record at the company level, using the exact classification language from the applicable wage determination rather than internal shorthand like “carpenter 2”
- Create sub jobs to separate funded scopes from unfunded ones on mixed projects, so hours split by funding source without anyone reconstructing it later
- Build cost codes that let you report hours by trade, since certified payroll is organized by classification while job costing usually is not
- Turn on timesheet signatures and lock approved periods, since an edited timecard behind a filed report is a compliance problem, not a data problem
What causes the most certified payroll errors?
Fringe benefit credits and apprentice documentation. Fringe can be paid in cash on the check or contributed to a bona fide plan, and the hourly credit you claim has to be annualized across all hours worked, not just prevailing wage hours. Contractors routinely overstate it by dividing plan cost by public works hours only.
Apprentices may be paid below the journeyman rate only if they are registered in an apprenticeship program recognized by the DOL Office of Apprenticeship or a state agency, and only within the ratios that program allows. An unregistered helper on a Davis-Bacon site is owed the full journeyman rate for every hour, and that calculation is what shows up as an audit finding.
Penalties reach past back pay. Contract funds can be withheld, CWHSSA liquidated damages accrue per affected worker per day at a rate adjusted annually for inflation, and debarment runs up to three years.
Where do state and program rules diverge?
California requires contractors on public works to register with the Department of Industrial Relations and submit certified payroll electronically through the eCPR system at least monthly, with records furnished within 10 days of a written request under Labor Code 1776. New York publishes prevailing wage schedules each July 1 under Article 8 of the Labor Law. Clean energy projects claiming the increased Inflation Reduction Act credit face a separate apprenticeship labor hours requirement, 15 percent for projects beginning construction in 2024 or later.
Multi-state contractors end up maintaining several classification lists at once. Holding them at the company level in Procore construction software is what keeps that manageable, and Procore construction software setup done with certified payroll in mind is considerably cheaper than paying for it in back wages. If your reports keep coming back for correction, a review of your timecard fields and sub job structure is the right place to start.