Payroll mistakes in a contracting business usually start well before payday: a missed clock-out, a drive from the shop nobody wrote down, a salaried foreman who still works alongside the crew. Here is where they come from, plus a weekly routine for catching them.
By Jonathan Champion, founder of ChampEntra · Updated October 12, 2026
Your payroll provider or bookkeeper pays what the time records say. In field work, those records get pieced together from phone punches, paper timesheets, group texts and a foreman’s memory of a long week.
This guide is general information, not legal, tax or payroll advice. Wage and hour rules depend on the work, the worker and the state, so confirm how they apply to your company with your payroll provider, your CPA or the U.S. Department of Labor. The Department’s Wage and Hour Division offers compliance help for employers and a toll-free line at 1-866-487-9243.
Before any pay rule applies, the hours have to be right. These gaps open up when crews start the day away from the office.
Timesheets filled in at the end of the week are estimates. A short Tuesday becomes a full day, a lunch gets forgotten, and two crew members remember the same job differently. Federal recordkeeping rules call for each nonexempt employee’s hours worked each day and total hours each workweek, kept by any method that is complete and accurate. Record time the day it happens, against the job.
The crew meets at the shop at 6:30, loads the trailer and clocks in at the site at 7:15. If they were loading at 6:30, they were working at 6:30. Federal guidance counts travel from one job site to another during the workday as hours worked, and the drive from the shop depends on the facts. In a 2020 opinion letter about a construction company, the Department of Labor concluded that foremen required to pick up a company truck at the shop were on the clock for the drive, while laborers who chose to ride along to a nearby job were still commuting.
Under the same federal hours-worked guidance, short rest breaks, usually 20 minutes or less, count as work time. A lunch only comes off the clock when the employee is completely relieved from duty, so a foreman eating in the truck while fielding supplier calls is still working. So is the crew member who stays late to finish cleanup: work you allow has to be paid, even if nobody asked for it.
Once the hours are right, these are the rules easiest to get wrong in construction. Ask your payroll provider or CPA to confirm each one for your company, and remember that your state may add rules of its own.
You don’t need a payroll department for this. You need the same few checks, in the same order, every week.
Our time tracking best practices and our guide to digital job reports versus paper forms cover the first two steps in more detail.
Software can make this routine faster, but it can’t make pay decisions for you. In ChampEntra, crew members clock in and out against the job they’re on, with optional shift GPS that each employee consents to, and the office reviews hours by person, day and job before they move to payroll preparation.
It depends on the trip. Under federal guidance, the normal commute from home to the job is generally not work time, but travel from one job site to another during the workday is. A required stop at the shop to pick up a company truck, tools or materials can change the answer, so set a written policy with your payroll provider or CPA.
Possibly. A title or a salary does not, by itself, make someone exempt. Exemption also depends on the actual duties of the job, and federal guidance says non-management construction workers are not exempt no matter how much they earn. Ask your CPA or payroll provider to review each salaried role.
Federal rules call for keeping payroll records for at least three years, and time cards and other records used to figure wages for at least two. Your state or your accountant may want them kept longer, so ask before you throw anything out.
No. ChampEntra’s team and payroll time tools help you collect hours with job context and prepare them for payroll. Your payroll provider or accountant still processes payroll, deposits taxes and files returns.
Tell us how your crews track time today, whether that’s paper sheets, group texts or an app that never caught on. ChampEntra can set up time tracking, daily job reports and payroll preparation around the way your company works.