Certified Payroll Reporting in Viewpoint Vista: A Step-by-Step Guide
SelectView Data Solutions works with Trimble Viewpoint Vista and Spectrum. We help contractors get certified payroll out of Vista accurately and on time – including the Craft/Class setup that most reporting problems trace back to. This guide covers what certified payroll requires, how Vista produces it, and the five configuration decisions that determine whether your weekly submission goes through clean, or comes back rejected.
What is certified payroll reporting?
Certified payroll is a weekly payroll report you must submit on publicly funded construction projects, signed under penalty of perjury, showing that every worker was paid at least the prevailing wage for the classification of work they performed. In the United States the federal format is form WH-347, issued by the Department of Labor.
It is not a payroll register with a different header. A certified payroll report has to show hours by work classification, the prevailing base rate, the fringe benefit portion, and how fringes were satisfied – paid in cash or contributed to an approved plan. That last point is where most contractors get tripped up, because the fringe calculation depends on how your earnings and deduction codes are configured, not on what you intended to pay.
Which projects require certified payroll?
Any project funded wholly or partly with public money is likely to require it. The threshold and the governing statute depend on the funding source:
Funding source
Governing rule
Typical threshold
Federal
Davis-Bacon Act and Davis-Bacon Related Acts
Contracts over $2,000
Federal highway / DOT
Davis-Bacon, often via state DOT administration
Varies by state program
State public works
State prevailing wage law (for example New York Article 8)
Varies – some states have no threshold
Municipal / county
Local ordinance, frequently mirroring state law
Varies
Private with public financing
Statute attached to the funding
Check the contract, not the owner type
Two practical warnings.
First, the requirement follows the funding, not the owner – a privately owned project with public financing can still be covered.
Second, if you work in more than one state, you are almost certainly dealing with more than one format and more than one submission portal.
How does Viewpoint Vista handle certified payroll?
Vista produces certified payroll natively from the Payroll module. Three standard reports do most of the work:
Vista standard report
What it produces
When to use it
PR Certified Payroll
The compliance-format report for a Davis-Bacon job
Weekly submission
PR Certified Payroll Transcript
A supporting transcript of the same period
Audits and back-up
PR Certified Payroll Report With Liabilities
Adds employer liability detail
Where fringes are paid to plans
Under the covers, these read from the database Payroll Transaction History, Employee Header and the Job Header. That matters for one reason: the report can only be as correct as the timecard data behind it. Vista will faithfully report whatever classification and rate were entered – it does not know that a laborer was actually doing operator work on Thursday.
Craft and Class: the setting everything depends on
In Vista, prevailing wage compliance runs through Craft and Class. The Craft is the trade; the Class is the level or sub-classification within it. For example, Craft is Steelworker and Class is Journeyman.
Together they drive the pay rate, the fringe rates, and the classification printed on the certified report.
Vista holds the configuration in a set of related Payroll tables – Craft Class, Class Pay Rates, Craft Class Earnings, and Craft Class Deductions and Liabilities – plus accumulator detail for rates that build up over time.
Practically, this means your wage determination has to be translated into Vista configuration before a single timecard is entered:
Create a Craft for each trade named in the wage determination.
Create a Class under each Craft for every level and rate the determination lists, including apprentice steps.
Enter the base rate and the fringe rate separately on each Class – not combined.
Attach the earnings codes and the deduction and liability codes that represent how fringes are satisfied.
Map the fringe benefit type so the report can show whether fringes were paid in cash or to a plan.
If a wage determination is updated mid-project – and on multi-year work it will be – the new rates need effective-dated Class records. Overwriting the old rate is the single most common cause of a retroactive underpayment finding.
What the WH-347 needs, and where Vista gets it
WH-347 requirement
Vista source
Where it goes wrong
Employee name and identifier
Employee master
Missing or duplicated employee records
Work classification
Craft / Class on the timecard
Timecard entered against the wrong Class
Hours by day, by classification
Timecard detail by job
Hours booked to the job but not the Craft/Class
Base hourly rate
Class Pay Rates
Rate overwritten instead of effective-dated
Fringe rate and how satisfied
Class earnings, deductions and liabilities
Fringe combined into the base rate
Gross, deductions, net
Payroll transaction history
Usually fine – this is standard payroll
Project identification
Job master
Job set up without the prevailing wage flag
Why certified payroll fails in Vista: the five usual causes
In our experience almost every rejected or reworked submission traces back to one of these. None of them are Vista faults – they are configuration and process gaps.
Fringe folded into the base rate.
The total pay is right, but the report cannot show the split, and reviewers reject it.
Classification drift in the field.
A worker performs two classifications in a week and the timecard records only one. The fix is process, not software: split hours by Craft/Class at entry.
Wage determination updated in place.
Old periods re-report at the new rate, which looks like an underpayment in earlier weeks.
Apprentice ratios not tracked.
Apprentice rates are only valid within the registered ratio; exceed it and those hours owe journeyman rate.
Multi-company confusion.
Vista installs commonly run many companies, and payroll for one legal entity gets reported under another.
State formats and third-party portals
The federal WH-347 is only the starting point. Many states and agencies require their own layout or a submission through a compliance portal such as LCPtracker, eMars or Elation. Vista carries fringe benefit type mapping intended for this kind of downstream reporting, which is why getting the fringe configuration right pays off twice – once on the WH-347 and again on every portal upload.
Where a portal expects a specific file layout, the practical answer is an export built directly against Vista data rather than manual re-keying. We build these for clients – our AASHTOWare payroll exporter is one example, used by DOT contractors to produce compliant certified payroll files without retyping the week.
How to automate the weekly submission
Certified payroll is a weekly deadline that never moves, which makes it a strong candidate for automation. A workable sequence:
Validate at entry.
Add a review step that flags timecards on prevailing wage jobs with a missing or improbable Craft/Class before payroll is processed.
Reconcile before submitting.
Compare certified payroll hours to job cost labor hours for the same week. A difference means hours are coded to the job but not the classification.
Generate the required format.
Run the Vista certified payroll report, or an export mapped to the portal layout where one is required.
Keep the evidence.
Retain the transcript and liability versions alongside the submitted file. Auditors ask for the process details, not just the result.
Track submissions.
Maintain a simple register of job, week ending, format, submitted date and acceptance. This is the first thing requested in an audit.
None of this requires leaving Vista. It requires the configuration to be right and the weekly steps to be the same every week.
Payroll Configuration Resources
Many experienced consultants work in the Viewpoint ecosystem. Payroll configuration is a complex task; Vista and Spectrum are built to handle most, if not all, necessary configurations. We recommend identifying a Viewpoint consultant who knows the accounting system inside and out. Usually what seems like an impossible mapping from requirements to Vista configuration can be solved with a combination of deep experience and creativity.
Where SelectView fits
In some cases, the Viewpoint system configuration cannot accommodate the exact set up that you need. Vista and Spectrum provide a strong system for customizations or manipulation of data, to get the exact results you need. Sometimes the data is perfect, but the layout or aggregation needs a tweak. SelectView’s experience on the data and the reporting layer means you can report exactly what happened, in the exact format needed for compliance.
For a few clients, we have built data processes to improve set up of the configurations by copying and modifying configurations already on your system.
We’ve produced an out-of-the-box WH-347 as well as a desktop solution for AASHTOWare reporting. The AASHTOWare system can save your team several hours each week.
Conclusion
Running certified payroll on Vista and not confident the configuration is right? SelectView can introduce you to recognized experts for set up. If you do need special handling or find that your team is overloaded with weekly manual work, we can improve the process to reliably deliver the right data week after week, automatically. Talk to our Vista team.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is certified payroll in construction?
A weekly report submitted on publicly funded projects, signed under penalty of perjury, showing each worker’s classification, hours, base rate and fringe benefits to prove prevailing wages were paid.
Does Viewpoint Vista produce certified payroll reports?
Yes. Vista includes PR Certified Payroll, PR Certified Payroll Transcript and PR Certified Payroll Report With Liabilities in the Payroll module. Accuracy depends on Craft/Class configuration and timecard coding.
How do I set up prevailing wage rates in Vista?
Translate the wage determination into Craft and Class records, entering the base rate and fringe rate separately on each Class, then attach the earnings, deduction and liability codes that represent how fringes are paid.
Why does my Vista certified payroll report show the wrong rate?
Most often because a wage determination was updated in place rather than added as an effective-dated Class record, so historical weeks re-report at the current rate.
Can Vista export to LCPtracker or eMars?
Vista holds fringe benefit type mapping for downstream compliance reporting, and portal-specific file layouts are normally handled with a purpose-built export against Vista data rather than manual entry.
How long should certified payroll records be kept?
Retention is set by the governing statute and the contract – commonly at least three years after project completion, and often longer for state work. Check the specific contract terms.
What happens if certified payroll is wrong?
Consequences range from rejected submissions and withheld payment to back-wage liability and debarment from future public work. The financial exposure is usually the withheld progress payment.