Send me one week of certified payroll. You get a findings report back in two business days.
No call. No login. No access to any of your systems. Two CSV exports by email, a written report in return. It costs nothing and there is no sequence afterwards.
If you file certified payroll in Florida, the change lands on 30 September 2026. That makes this week the cheap time to look.
Why I'm offering this
I spend my days as a superintendent on commercial jobsites, and I build integration software for contractors. Certified payroll is where those two things meet, and it is the most under-watched compliance surface I see.
It is filed weekly, for the life of the job, signed under penalty of perjury — and almost nobody checks it before it goes out. The errors that matter are not typos. They are structural, they repeat every week once they start, and they surface in an audit long after the crew has moved on.
I would rather show you what I find than tell you what I know.
What I look at
| Check | What goes wrong |
|---|---|
| Hours broken down by classification | If someone works two classifications in a week and the timecard cannot show which hours were which, the breakdown is not there to be filed. A cost-code gap in your timekeeping quietly becomes a crew-week you cannot defend. |
| The arithmetic closes | Gross for all work, less deductions, equals net — exactly. Deductions come off all work and are not pro-rated to the project, so it either ties or it doesn't. |
| Overtime against the 40-hour week | Summed across every job, not per job — which is how it gets missed when someone splits a week between two projects. |
| Apprentice ratios | By ratio group, and whether the apprentices on the payroll are actually registered. |
| The wage floor, not just the determination | See the note above. This is the one nothing else checks. |
What I don't do
Stated up front, because reports that overclaim are worthless.
- I don't tell you that you're compliant. I tell you what I found and what I did not examine. Nobody can certify compliance from two spreadsheets.
- I don't compare your pay rates against the determination's published rates — not in the free review.
- I don't review fringe benefit plans, or recompute whether an hourly fringe credit was annualised correctly. That is the most common fringe error and it cannot be checked from two files.
- I don't sign anything. The Statement of Compliance can only be signed by you, an officer, or someone who supervises the payment of wages — 29 CFR 3.3(b) and 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(C). A third-party consultant is none of those. Preparing a payroll in any format is expressly permitted; certifying it is not, and I would be wary of anyone who offers otherwise.
- I don't give legal advice. Classification decisions and what is owed are your determinations. Contested ones belong with your attorney.
What to send
Two files, in whatever format your system exports. If your column names differ, send them anyway — mapping them takes me thirty seconds.
1 — Timecards (one row per person, per day, per cost code)
employee_id, job_id, work_date, cost_code, hours, ot_hours2 — Payroll (one row per person, per week)
employee_id, week_ending, gross_all_work, net_paid, [your deduction columns]Plus a short note listing, for each job: the county, the construction type (building / residential / highway / heavy), and the wage determination number and revision if you have it to hand.
What comes back
A written report naming every finding, with the row or date it came from, sorted into three buckets: must fix before filing, needs a decision, and for your awareness. Every item traces back to your own export, so you can check my work in a couple of minutes.
If nothing is wrong, the report says so plainly. That is a perfectly good outcome and it costs you nothing either way.
Then what
Nothing automatic. There is no drip sequence and I won't call you.
If the findings show a pattern rather than a one-off, I do a paid written diagnostic ($250–$500): I review 20–50 of your real records and return a one-page findings memo plus a scope for fixing the underlying cause. Most of the time that cause is a cost-code structure that doesn't map cleanly onto the classifications you bill against — a fixable, one-time problem rather than a permanent tax on your payroll clerk.
If it doesn't, you've had a free review and I've learned something about how your shop runs.