Piecework payroll can be a very beneficial way to pay non union construction workers, if done fairly. The state of California makes it very difficult to do this though. When I first sat down with my client, they were calculating payroll using a spreadsheet. One of the big problems was that they couldn’t easily calculate certain fractions of an hour and so they were forced to round up. Working with the payroll admin and getting approval from the labor attorneys, we developed a simple system in Access that properly calculated the time, calculated the proper “Bonus” time, generated finalized time sheets for all employees and created the import file for the payroll vendor. The program immediately saved money just on the proper rounding of the time. Also, the reporting made the accounting clerk’s job much easier, giving her time to work in other areas of the business. Later we added the ability to pull the job estimates into the system so that they could quickly report budgets to superintendents.