Payroll for construction: What Sage Intacct includes and how to choose a provider

Sage Intacct Construction does not include payroll in its base subscription. We recommend and bundle Hammr. It handles certified payroll, prevailing wage by county and trade, and multi-union projects, and it posts labor cost to the job from the timesheet.

We sat down with our team to explain what Sage Intacct Construction includes for payroll and how contractors should evaluate the options around it.

Construction payroll requirements

For many businesses, payroll is mainly about paying people correctly and handling taxes. Construction payroll also has to account for how and where employees work.

Use those three requirements when evaluating a construction payroll provider. The provider also needs to tax hours based on where the work happens. Contractors may not expect to owe local tax in a place where the company and employee are not based.

Some states are more complicated than Michigan. Monica says that in Ohio, nearly every place you work has its own job-specific tax. This becomes more important as a contractor’s service area grows.

The job-cost payroll difference from Sage 300 CRE

Sage 300 CRE users often expect detailed job-cost payroll when they move to Sage Intacct Construction. Tina Rehberg sees this with the clients she helps through that move.

In Sage Intacct Construction, labor reaches the job through the payroll provider's sync, so the day-to-day job-cost view depends on which provider you pick. Anyone leaving Sage 300 CRE should understand this in the first planning meeting, before the first close.

Payroll therefore needs to be included when planning the move. Sage designed Sage Intacct Construction as an open system so payroll specialists could build integrations. We pair it with Hammr, whose sync posts labor cost at the timesheet level before the pay period closes. This gives a Sage 300 CRE controller the detailed job-cost information they expect.

Payroll service versus an in-house engine

Most companies now want a payroll service provider to handle tax filings and reports.

Construction companies adopted payroll services later than other businesses. For years, no service could handle union reporting and payments or prevailing-wage reporting, so contractors kept payroll in-house whether they wanted to or not. A small group can handle those requirements now. Monica names Miter and ADP among them; our own pick is Hammr.

An embedded engine is the other model. When Monica implemented Acumatica, it had true embedded payroll and handled multi-locality taxes well. The contractor’s own team still handled payroll in-house, including the W-2s, tax filings, and everything else a service would have handled for them. The product was also still working out workers’ compensation and certified payroll.

With an embedded system, your team handles the payroll work. A payroll service handles the filings for you. Most contractors we meet want a service, so that is the option we recommend first.

What Sage Intacct Construction includes

Payroll is not part of the base Sage Intacct Construction subscription. Sage sells two add-ons of its own, an outsourced option through ADP, and the platform is built for specialist providers like Hammr to connect. So the question is which of those fits your company.

We recommend and bundle Hammr as our preferred provider.

We prefer Hammr because it meets the requirements described above. It handles certified payroll and prevailing wages stored by county and trade, supports multi-union wage tables that can be assigned by project, provides mobile field time, and handles California’s break and overtime rules in the same system.

Sage’s own options are both in-house payroll, meaning your team runs it and owns the filings. Sage Intacct Construction Payroll is an add-on module that Sage sells but did not build. It comes from Struxi, a small Wisconsin payroll vendor that belongs to a legacy construction ERP company, and that company was sold to a software holding group in 2024. The module does certified payroll, union rates, and multi-state tax, and it has improved, but an employee pay stub portal only arrived in 2024, we could not find a single independent review of it anywhere, and our team has not been impressed with it in practice. Sage’s own investment has moved elsewhere: Sage HCM for Construction launched in April 2026 with certified payroll, union rules, prevailing wage, and job-cost sync across Sage Intacct Construction, Sage 300 CRE, and Sage 100 Contractor. It is new, and we have not seen it fully tested for construction payroll, so treat it as a candidate to evaluate rather than a proven choice for union or prevailing-wage work.

If you already run ADP

If you already run ADP, the answer depends on which ADP product you use. ADP Workforce Now, connected to Sage Intacct Construction, supports certified and union payroll while ADP handles filing and payment as a service. Monica specifies the Workforce Now edition because it is the version with the connector.

You should also evaluate the ADP team that will implement the connector.

ADP runs that connector implementation, not us. The result depends on whether the assigned team understands construction payroll. If the assigned team does not have the right experience, changing teams can be slow.

If ADP Workforce Now already serves you well, you can keep it. Evaluate the connector implementation as carefully as you evaluated the payroll product.

Evaluate the provider and implementation team

Monica recommends evaluating the implementation team for every provider on this page, including ours:

Judge every option by its support for detailed job costing, union payroll, prevailing wage and multi-locality taxes. Then ask who will implement it and whether that team has done this work for contractors before.

You have three options. You can bundle Hammr with us, which is what we recommend. You can keep ADP Workforce Now if it already serves you and you can get an ADP team with the right experience to implement the connector. You can also evaluate Miter and Sage HCM using the same criteria, with the understanding that Sage HCM is not yet proven for construction.

Choose the provider during solution design. Labor cost reaches the job through the payroll sync, so if you delay this decision, job costs will not include labor when the system goes live.