The Essential Features of a Union Payroll Solution That Works

The construction sector often engages several contractors for every project to supply skilled laborers in multiple domains. While engaging general contractors is not a new thing, complexity arises when union payroll comes into the picture. With employees being free to be a part of any union they favor a construction project may involve workers affiliated with multiple unions. This means they must manage their payroll obligations by considering union-specific traits such as union reductions, custom union payroll laws or acts, regional membership regulations surrounding fair wages, and much more.

Today, construction companies operating with a network of contractors would do well to manage their union payroll complexities mostly with the help of digital solutions rather than relying on traditional Excel-based spreadsheet construction project management initiatives. However, businesses often face the problem of selecting a solution without having a clear idea of what it must achieve for them. On this note, let us explore the 5 essential features that a modern union payroll solution must assure its customers:

Eliminate Manual Timesheets

A key challenge for construction companies while dealing with contractors who provide the workforce is capturing and managing work effort or, in other words maintaining timesheets. With the added complexity of union payroll, this challenge amplifies into new dimensions. When construction companies select a union payroll solution, they expect the system to eliminate the use of manual spreadsheet data management and provide comprehensive visibility into time and effort tracking for all parties.

Depending on the worksite or regional differences, construction companies may require their general contractors to use different time tracking or attendance processes. A good union payroll solution must integrate seamlessly with all popular attendance systems to offer automated timesheet maintenance abilities.

Compliance

The construction sector is heavily scrutinized by government authorities due to the large volume of human labor involved. This leads to a heavy toll on payroll processing when it comes to mitigating compliance challenges. There are individual compliance bodies in almost all states separately in addition to federal policy frameworks.

The construction management or union payroll system in use must be able to provide a framework for organizing payroll that is compliant with site-specific requirements, general compliance laws, and unique policies like the Davis-Bacon act. The software must ensure that finance and administration teams manage compliance effectively without bias, thereby helping the business stay compliant and market competitive.

Customization

When working with general contractors who have employees enrolled with different unions, construction companies need a large volume of custom data to be captured and recorded for use by all stakeholders. Shift-based allowances, union deductions., pay scales, fringe benefits, special pay, etc., may vary according to the union enrolled by an employee as well as differ in different states.

The union payroll system the business leverages must provide easily customizable data-capturing abilities that allow them to configure different pay scales and further automate payments depending on custom rules. The system must provide custom automated reporting capabilities to ensure that different stakeholders can easily access the necessary data to validate compliance and legal requirements.

Support Financial Audit

Every year, construction companies may be dealing with projects of different magnitude with costs in the range of a few hundred thousand dollars to even billions. These may involve labor managed by contractors across different locations. Labor costs make up a significant portion of the company’s expenditure, and hence payroll data must be transparent and easily accessible for audits at any time, especially during the closure of the financial year.

Hence, the union payroll system selected by a construction company must provide data necessary for faster audits and ensure there is comprehensive visibility into both unionized payroll information as well as payroll for non-unionized workers.

Simplified Experience

As seen from the other features we covered, a union payroll system deals with a lot of complex payroll functions. However, the core essential element of a modern union payroll system is that it should eliminate this complexity and provide a simplified payroll, benefit, and tax management system all under one single roof with simple dashboards.

Such an experience will enable leaders to easily make unbiased decisions on operational needs and ensure that there is sustainable growth in the business while at the same time ensuring that employees are happy.

In a Nutshell

What construction companies need today is a fully integrated and customizable union payroll software that enables seamless management of all agreements, frameworks, and reporting needs of multi-faceted union payrolls.

This is what CEM offers with our state-of-the-art Union Payroll system that has been designed and developed exclusively for the construction sector. The intuitive solution reduces complexity and brings all union rates, differentials, benefits, and real-time productivity and utilization reporting into a single place.

Get in touch with us to explore more about how your business can navigate the nuances of modern construction payroll with ease.