How many others are wasting countless hours each week verifying and fixing Prevailing Wage calculations? I am at the end of my rope and need support from everyone else who is overpaying their employees because the programmers at Viewpoint didn't write the software to calculate prevailing wages, fringe benefit credits and overtime calculations correctly.
In the 6.12 release they announced they were going to enhance the product where you could input a weekly lump sum amount for fringes and the system would automatically and dynamically compute and give credit for your actual hourly rate. This would have been fantastic since the system would change your fringe credits to account for changes in hours worked each week. If you pay $100 per week for health, dental and vision insurance, the system would compute an hourly fringe credit of $2.50/hour if the employee worked 40 hours but calculate a $4.00/hour credit if the employee only worked 25 hours and only $2.00/hour if the employee worked 50 hours that week. That would be great, if it worked as advertised.
In October, I hired Viewpoint to help me set it up. Guess what? Once your employee works on more than 1 job, the system doesn't calculate properly and all your records are incorrect including job costs, certified payroll reports etc. For some reason (a flaw in the programming) the system doesn't know how to allocate the costs to more than 1 job. I don't know about other companies, but our employees usually work on multiple jobs each week, some subject to Davis Bacon requirements and other jobs not subject to these requirements. For a software company geared to the construction industry, I would think this should be a basic requirement. I don't know if Viewpoint is still saying this works, but if they are, don't set it up because it doesn't work.
Their response after many wasted hours of set up, go back to an hourly rate for each type of fringe. I did that and it still doesn't compute properly and I am told that I should log my suggestion here so the more people that agree, the more likely they are to fix it. Please support me in my cause to get Viewpoint to fix and support their software in regards to calculating Prevailing Wages according to Federal Rules with the ability to change depending on specific state requirements.
Guest
| Company | KE&G Construction, Inc. |
| Job Title / Role | Controller |
| I need it... | Yesterday...Come on already |
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A little background -
The effective hourly rate of a flat amount liability (amount/hours worked) is used in prevailing wage calculations to determine the additional cash add-on that may be required to meet a PW package total.
If that liability is designated as craft based and assigned to a craft, class or craft template it will be calculated for each combination the employee works under during the pay period. If he works multiple classes or jobs under different templates, the liability will be processed for each. If the amount is limited by pay period, only the first instance (job) will be charged for the expense - which is then reflected on that job's CPR.
We are investigating a potential solution that involves assigning the liability as employee based - (i.e. do not assign it as a liability on the craft, class, or template). It can still be included as a Capped Basis code, but should calculate and distribute over all earnings in the pay period. Testing is underway and I'll post the results here.
In the meantime, I want to suggest that conversion of flat amount fringes to rate/hour is an acceptable, even recommended approach by the DOL - see https://www.dol.gov/whd/recovery/pwrb/Tab9.pdf
We also experienced the same predicament as you. I have several employees who work on prevailing and non-prevailing wage projects each week. Most of our fringe costs are a fixed amount. Given that our employees work various hours each week, the hourly rate for each of the fringes will change week-to-week. I've spent many hours with Viewpoint support on this issue before they came to same conclusion you received, and that was to put in a suggestion to see if Viewpoint decides it's time to resolve this issue.
At this point, every week our payroll administrator has to update rates for each employee to the correct rate based on the employee's hours worked for the week. This takes quite a bit of time due to the manual calculations for each employee and fringe category. A fix to this problem would be outstanding!
Our PW wage setup is working. In JC master setup Craft template by job.(rates by project) Then break-up fringe on hourly basis not weekly.
Total Rate 59.35
PR craft class templates:
New Basic Hourly rate 38.48, New fringe is 20.87
Go to add-on earning- Earning code for " Benefits/cash Fringe" 9.00
Go to Dedns/liab - add in Liab code "PW Retiremnt" 11.87
In Template Master- setup capped basis and add-on earning codes
I think the issue is that wage calculations vary per county, state, job, and prevailing/non-prevailing. I agree, its' absolutely nuts. We've done a lot of custom reports to help our payroll person, but there's still sooooo much room for improvement on Viewpoint's part.