Today, users who work with prevailing wage requirements (for example, public works or government-funded projects) have to manage and validate rates and classifications manually. This is time‑consuming and error‑prone — especially when there are multiple job types, labor classes, and changing wage determinations. Mistakes can lead to underpayment, overpayment, compliance issues, and extra rework for payroll and project teams.

The prevailing wage automation feature simplifies how prevailing wage data is stored, applied, and updated so payroll can be processed more accurately and efficiently.

Enhancements

Time Tracking in ExakTime

ExakTime is introducing several new enhancements in ExakTime for users using Arcoro Payroll. These updates improve job structure management, certified payroll workflows, and labor class assignments, while preparing the system for deeper future integrations.

• Jobs
  • Admins can now create jobs with a new job entity in ExakTime.  The job management section is located under Manage > Jobs.
  • The new Job entity provides an expanded structure for managing project details.  Once a user navigates to the jobs page, they see a main grid showing all jobs and a details page for each job.
  • Main grid
  • Job detail
    
  • To create a Job in ExakTime, an admin can add the following fields:
    1. ID: Required. Each Job and Subjob requires a unique ID.
    2. Name: Required. Each Job and Subjob requires a unique Name + ID combination.
    3. Start Date: Optional. Does not currently affect job availability.
    4. End Date: Optional. Does not currently affect job availability.
    5. Certified Job toggle: Enables tagging of jobs for prevailing wage requirements.
    6. Department: Optional. Assigning a department applies that department to all time records for the job.
    7. Location Assignment: Select all, one, or multiple locations available for time tracking to the job.
  • Certified Jobs – A job may be marked as certified by an admin in ExakTime.  This flag ensures that a labor class is chosen when an employee clocks into a job.
  • Jobs and Locations – When a job is created, locations are associated with that job.  This allows field employees the ability to clock in to the correct location.  When they choose a job on clock in they will only be shown associated locations.
  • For any user who has jobs turned on, they are now a required field for any employee to choose when they clock in.
• Labor Classes - Labor Classes support certified job workflows by documenting what classification a worker is working in for a time period.  If a job is flagged as certified, employees are required to choose a labor class when they clock in.
  • Admins can create labor classes by navigating to Manage > Labor Classes in ExakTime.  Like jobs, there is a main page to manage labor classes and a labor class detail.
  • Main grid
    
  • Labor Class detail
    
  • To create a labor class, admins need to complete the following fields
    1. ID – required
    2. Name – required
    3. As a rule, the ID + Name combination must be unique. Duplicate IDs may be used only when paired with unique Names.
  • Labor class assignment
    1. Employees are assigned to labor classes in ExakTime.
    2. If an employee is assigned to a labor class, that labor class will be selectable for that employee when they clock in.
    3. If an employee does not have any assigned labor classes, they will see the full list of labor classes when clocking into a certified job.
    4. Labor class is a required selection if an employee clocks into a certified job and an optional selection if the job is not marked as certified.
  • Viewing job and labor class fields on employees' timecards – When jobs are enabled, they are a required field on timecards.  In addition, timecards will now show the two new fields of Job and Labor Class.
  • Job and labor class will also be shown on time sheets.
    
  • Mobile - Jobs and labor classes will now both be selectable during the clock in process on Exaktime Mobile.

Syncing Time from ExakTime

• Once you are tracking job and labor class fields with employee time, you have the correct metadata included with employee time for admins to validate prevailing wage rates.  When an admin is ready to run payroll, time data is sent from ExakTime to Payroll via the Integrations module.
  • The integrations module can be found in the main navigation at the top.
    
  • Once you are in the Integrations module, run the sync from ExakTime to Payroll.  When the sync is run, it will ask for payroll information, so it knows which employee’s time to pull into Payroll.
    
  • The new metadata fields of job and labor class are now included in the sync to payroll with employees’ timecards. This allows the payroll system to validate pay rates.  The new fields are shown on the payroll details when a payroll is created.
    

Creating Rate Tables

In the payroll product, the first action an admin takes to begin to validate employee pay is to create pay rate tables based on the wage determination decisions they have received. 

• An admin creates pay rate tables by navigating to the Wage Determination section under Setup.   The Wage Determination navigation page is only accessible to payroll admins and controllers.
  
• Once an admin navigates to the Wage Determination page, they see a main grid with their pay rate tables, shown by job. The main grid shows the following fields:
  • Actions – An admin can copy or edit the pay rate table
  • Job – The job that the pay rate table is tied to.  This is created and managed in ExakTime
  • Effective Date – The date on which the pay rate table can be used to validate employee pay rates
  • Expiration Date – The date on which the pay rate table stops being used to validate pay rates
  • Classifications – The number of labor classifications included in the pay rate table
  • Status – Active or Inactive
    
• To create a new pay rate table, an admin clicks the “Add Pay Rate Table” button.
• Once the admin begins creating a pay rate table, they will see several fields to get started (screenshot below).  The admin will first choose a job to attach this rate table to.  This tells the system when to apply the validation and rules.
  
• To create and save the pay rate table, the admin will set four additional fields and click save.
  • Effective date
  • Expiration date
  • Status
  • Automatically set rates toggle
  • Only job and effective date are required.
• Once these fields have been filled out, the admin adds labor classifications to the rate table by clicking “Add Classification.”
  
• When adding a classification, the admin chooses the labor class from a pre-filled list of labor classes created in ExakTime.  Once the labor class is chosen, the admin sets the base rate and any additional hourly rates for the labor classifications' pay.  Once all details are entered, the admin clicks “Add” to add the labor class to the pay rate table.
• Below is a description of each field.
  • Base rate – The hourly wage rate associated with regular hours for the labor classification.
  • OT Rate – The hourly overtime rate required to be paid for this labor class and job.
  • DT – The hourly doubletime rate required to be paid for this labor class and job.
  • Fringe rate – The hourly rate in bona fide fringe benefits that are required to be paid on this job for the labor class.
• Once all desired labor classifications are added to the rate table, they will see them in the main grid.
  
• There are several constraints in place when it comes to editing and changing labor classifications in a rate table.  These constraints are in place to ensure the accuracy of the data is kept for rate validation.  The main constraints to be aware of, when setting up rate tables are:
  • A rate table can be made active/inactive at any time
  • A labor classification can be made active/inactive at any time, but cannot be deleted.
  • There cannot be more than 1 rate table for a given job.
  •  A labor classification can be edited.  This means an admin can change the rates associated with it.  If this happens, we will log all changes under the labor class name and show a history.  A screenshot is shown below of how the history will appear if a labor classification is edited.

Fringe Benefit Setup

An important component of validating employee pay is meeting prevailing wages, calculating how much each employee is making in Fringe benefits.  Fringe benefits are contributions made by an employer to a benefit plan for the employee.  These may include health insurance, retirement or pension, or sick leave.  As a reference, the U.S. Department of Labor defines fringe benefits on its website.

• To properly track how much an employer is contributing to fringe benefits, our payroll system first has to know which benefits are counted toward the fringe calculation of prevailing wage.  An administrator can mark benefits as “Prevailing Wage” applicable on their company benefits management screen (shown in screenshots below).
  • The company benefits management screen can be navigated to by clicking Setup > Benefits.
• The administrator marks a benefit as a prevailing wage benefit by toggling the “Prevailing Wage” toggle on the add/edit benefit screen.  After this toggle is turned on, the admin sees a confirmation of the status on the company’s main benefits grid.
  
  
• Once a benefit is marked as a prevailing wage benefit at the company level, the flag is also shown for any employee who has that benefit.  The flag showing if an employee has a prevailing wage benefit can be seen by navigating to the Employee profile > Benefits and Deductions.
  
• In addition to benefits being paid on behalf of an employee, employers can also credit accrued time off for vacation or sick leave as part of their fringe requirement that they must meet for prevailing wage.  If an administrator knows that their employees accrue time off in a bona fide plan, they can add this a fringe credit on the employee’s profile.
  • The fringe credit is added at the bottom of the employee’s benefits and deductions tab (shown below).
  • An admin can add as many fringe credits as they would like for an employee.
  • An admin adds a fringe credit by giving it a name, then specifying two data points.
  • First, the admin adds a dollar amount paid per hour for the credit accrued.  For example, if an employee is paid $40/hour for vacation time off, this value would be 40.
  • Second, the admin adds an amount of time accrued per hour of work.  If the worker accrues .25 hours of vacation time for every hour of work they complete, this value would be .25.
  • These two values are multiplied to tell the system how much should be counted for the fringe benefit.
  • *An important point here is that the admin will need to calculate the accrual rate for employees before entering them into the payroll system.
    
• Once the proper benefits are flagged as prevailing wage benefits and employees have the correct fringe credits associated with their profiles, an administrator can run payroll and let the system do the work.

Automatically Setting Rates

A large part of the value in our new Prevailing Wage Automation feature comes from the fact that payroll administrators don’t have to manage separate rate codes for new prevailing wage rates.  This time savings comes from the “Automatically Set Rates” toggle on the rate table.  In order to understand this, it is first important to understand how administrators manage employee pay in the payroll system. 

• For background, the way an employee is paid is based on their “Compensations” tab.  An employee’s time, when it comes into Payroll, is associated with a rate code.  Rate codes are associated with the hourly pay amount on the compensation tab of an employee.  An example of this is shown in the screenshot below.
  
• In a prevailing wage pay rate table, there is a toggle to “Automatically Set Rates.”
  
• If this toggle is enabled, the payroll system will set earning rates in the following way:
  • When employee time is synced into payroll by an administrator, payroll will check to see if a user has time that matches the active rate table.
  • If the employee has a time record that matches the rate table, it will look to see how much they are being paid hourly.
  • If their hourly earning, amount is below the prevailing wage in the rate table, the payroll system will overwrite the compensation amount with the prevailing wage rate.
  • If the employee’s hourly earning rate is at or above the prevailing wage rate, the payroll system will send the time over unchanged.
• Once earning rates are changed for an employee, a new system-generated rate code will be shown in two places, documenting the change
  • The new rate code will show on payroll items
  • The new rate code will show on employee compensation 
• The new earnings will be shown with a rate code that is system-generated with the following naming convention:
  • Job – labor class – time category
• If the “Automatically Set Rates” toggle is not set, no earning rates will be overwritten when time is synced.  The pay rate table will just be used to validate pay in a payroll.
• The “Automatically Set Rates” toggle will only overwrite earnings for the following categories of pay:
  • Regular time
  • Overtime
  • Doubletime
  • *This means that the feature does not automatically add earnings if the fringe is lower than expected.  An admin will have to adjust this manually after checking the employee's pay in the payroll.

Validating and Running Payroll

After compensations, benefits, and rate tables are configured properly, a payroll administrator is ready to complete a payroll run. During a payroll run, you will now see a new “Wage Determination” tab that validates employee pay amounts against what was added to the relevant pay rate tables.

• The wage determination tab will show for payrolls in draft status and is located next to the contractors tab.
  
• After an admin navigates to the wage determination tab, they can click the “Validate Payroll” button to check employee rates against active pay rate tables.
• Once the system is done validating employee pay, it will show employees on the page with alerts where pay does not meet prevailing wages.
  
• There are several components of the results on the Wage Determination tab that are important.
  • Employee display – Any employee who has pay in the payroll that matches an active rate table’s job and labor class is shown.
  • The validation for each employee runs two checks against employee pay:
    1. Individual rate checks – these check each rate type (regular, OT, DT, Fringe) against what the rate table states the employee should make.  If an individual rate check shows a rate lower than prevailing wage, the corresponding rate is highlighted in red.
       
    2. Total package rate checks – The second type of check that happens is a total package rate check.  Here, the system looks at the relevant active rate table and adds the base rate to the fringe rate, then compares it to the same sum from the employee’s pay.
    3. An example is shown below.  In this case, the employee’s total package prevailing wage rate is $58/hr ($30+$28).  The employee is making only $26 in total package, so we show an alert below the employee explaining this.
       
  • Employees with any alerts on their pay are shown on the tab with a flag.
  • Both the individual rate check and the total package check are necessary due to a condition of prevailing wage compliance.  Companies have the option to offset fringe requirements with extra cash in an employee’s regular pay.  Since this is the case, an admin may choose to pay fringe in extra wages, and this is their choice.
• The Wage Determination tab gives admins the ability to search by an employee’s name as well as filter the list of employees that display to look at only flagged employees.
  
• Each employee’s details can be expanded or collapsed using the arrow on the right side of their pay detail.
• If an admin needs to update an employee’s pay, they use the following process:
  • Update the employee’s compensation in the employee profile
  • Resync time data to payroll
  • Use the “Refresh Validation” button on the Wage Determination tab to check pay again. 
• There are two additional features on the Wage Determination tab that help an admin confirm that they are paying their employees the correct rate.
  • The first is a link to view the relevant pay rate table for an employee.  This takes the user to the rate table to check the details if necessary.
  • The second is an informational tooltip that displays the details of how the fringe hourly rate was arrived at.  When clicked, the “i” icon shows a grid with benefit contributions and hourly amounts used to arrive at the fringe hourly payment to the employee.
    

Reporting

There are three reports that support running certified payroll for administrators.

• Certified payroll (by job) - This report can be run with a filter on the job field and exports employee earnings data to be used for entry into WH-347 forms or into LCP tracker compliance software.
• Certified payroll (by location) - This report can be run with a filter on the location field and exports employee earnings data to be used for entry into WH-347 forms or into LCP tracker compliance software.
• Prevailing Wage Summary – This report is meant to be run for payrolls in draft status.  The report will show details of employee earnings so that an admin can check earnings against prevailing wage rates.
  • A sample of this report can be seen here - PrevailingWage_Summary_PayRates - SampleReport.xlsx

Availability and Access

Only payroll administrators and controllers will have the ability to navigate to the admin experience and create and manage mappings. 

Enablement 

The feature will be available to all payroll users for use with the March 26’ release

The Prevailing Wage feature can also be controlled using two additional enablement checkboxes in the company settings. To view these, an admin can click the gear icon in the top right of the payroll application, and they will see two checkboxes for “Wage Determination”.  These will be checked by default to show all prevailing wage functionality.  An admin can uncheck these if they would like to hide the ability to create pay rate tables or the wage determination tab from the payroll experience.