Certified payroll services in California, filed on time.
Books, payroll administration, tax planning, and every return you file — for California trade companies, under one monthly fee.
California will stop paying you over paperwork.
California runs the strictest prevailing wage regime in the country. You register with the Department of Industrial Relations before you can bid, you renew that registration, and you file certified payroll electronically through the state’s system on top of whatever the awarding body or a third-party tracker wants.
What makes California different is the consequence. Miss the filings and the money stops — payments get withheld while the paperwork gets sorted out. Penalties accrue per worker, per day. And an unregistered contractor or subcontractor on your job is your problem, not just theirs.
This is the state where certified payroll stops being an administrative chore and starts being a cash flow risk. We treat it that way.
What one fee covers.
Your books, current
We keep them, or we watch the ones you keep. Either way somebody is in your numbers every month, which is the only way any of the rest of this works.
Payroll, administered
Inside your own payroll account. You stay the employer, your money stays yours. Electronic certified payroll, registration renewals, fringe calculations, and multi-state crews are ordinary work here.
Planning and every return
Moves made during the year, not reported after it. Then the company return and your personal return, same fee.
Certified and prevailing-wage payroll is priced on its own line, per active project.
Your equipment deduction stops at the state line.
Two things make California expensive, and only one of them is the rate.
The rate is the highest in the country, and California has a pass-through entity election that can move some of that off your personal return. It’s elective, it has its own payment deadlines during the year, and it doesn’t happen unless somebody makes it happen.
The other one surprises people. California does not follow the federal rules on writing off equipment. The truck or the excavator you expensed in full on your federal return is depreciated slowly for California, over years. So the year you buy heavy, your federal bill drops and your California bill barely moves — and if nobody warned you, that’s a state estimated payment you didn’t budget for.
It also means the best month to buy a machine isn’t always the one your federal numbers suggest. That’s a conversation to have in October, not in April.
Who this is for.
Owner-operated specialty trade contractors doing roughly $1.5 million to $25 million: electrical, mechanical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, concrete, framing.
Southern California, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, the Inland Empire. If you bid public work, if you’re registered with the DIR, or if you own the yard as well as the business — that’s our lane.
We’re in Alabama. It has never mattered.
Everything runs through a secure client portal — documents, questions, approvals, signatures. You’re not driving anywhere and you’re not paying for an office you’ll never sit in.
Your certified payroll gets filed on time whether we’re four hundred miles away or two thousand.
Let’s find out what you’re carrying.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no pitch deck. Tell us what you build and how your books are kept, and we’ll tell you straight whether we can help.