LCPtracker vs CertifiedHours: a portal for primes and agencies, a generator for subs

LCPtracker is labor compliance software bought by public agencies and prime contractors. They use it to collect certified payrolls from every contractor on a project, run compliance checks against the wage determination, track apprentice ratios and workforce goals, and keep the records the agency needs.

If your prime or the awarding agency uses it, you will be given a login and asked to enter or upload each week's payroll into the portal. The portal then produces the certified payroll report in the agency's required format and routes it for review.

Pricing is by quote to the agency or prime. Subcontractors typically do not pay to submit into a project's LCPtracker account. LCPtracker also sells its own report-generation product to contractors.

Primes and agencies that need to collect and review payrolls from dozens of subs and prove compliance across a portfolio of projects.

Subs on a project where the prime requires it. That is not a choice; it is a condition of the contract.

It does not do your payroll math for you before you enter it. The portal checks what you typed against the determination and rejects what fails, which is useful, but the arithmetic still has to be right going in.

Each project's account belongs to that prime or agency. Your crew, classifications, and rates do not follow you to the next job with a different prime, and there is nothing to use on a project whose prime does not use LCPtracker.

Entering hours worker by worker into a web form every week is slow, and the interface was built for compliance officers, not for a bookkeeper on Friday afternoon.

CertifiedHours is where the payroll gets built: your crew and rates saved once, hours typed or imported each week, the overtime and fringe math run and checked, the WH-347 PDF produced. If the prime wants a PDF, you send it. If the prime wants it in LCPtracker, you enter the same figures there, and they pass the portal's checks because they were checked already.

Every finalized payroll also downloads as an LCPtracker upload file: a CSV in the layout of LCPtracker's own upload template, the payroll detail columns from payroll_number through prnotes, with hours by day, rates, fringe by category, and deductions split the way the portal expects. In LCPtracker, go to Payroll Records, then Upload Records, choose the file, and match your classifications to the project's crafts once. Employees are set up in the portal once by hand, since the template's employee columns want home addresses and this app does not hold them.

Everything stays with you between projects and between primes. Your history is in one place for the 3-year retention window, whatever portal each prime used.