Certified payroll for Gusto
Gusto made payroll pleasant, which is why so many smaller trade contractors run it. On certified payroll, Gusto is refreshingly honest about its limits, and the limits are total.
What Gusto gives you
Genuinely easy payroll, clean records, and exportable reports carrying workers, hours, rates, earnings, and deductions. For a sub with a tight crew, Gusto handles the paychecks with less friction than anything else on this list, and its exports carry what the filings need.
What it cannot do
Gusto's own help content states it directly: Gusto does not generate Form WH-347, and contractors who need certified payroll must use third-party software. That is the federal half. The California half is further away still: nothing in Gusto produces the DIR eCPR XML or files anything with the state. A Gusto sub on a non-exempt public works job owes a weekly WH-347 and a DIR eCPR with native support for neither, and the QuickBooks-world add-on escape hatch does not exist here: the established bolt-ons attach to QuickBooks Desktop, not to Gusto.
We meet a lot of Gusto subs right after their first public works award, discovering all of this in week one with a filing already due. If that is you, the good news is the timeline: setup happens the same week, and if you just won the project, your first filing can be ready before the deadline.
How our mapping works with Gusto
You export the payroll report from Gusto and send it. During the one time $995 setup we map your layout: earnings types to straight time and overtime, deductions and any fringe arrangements to the buckets the filings require, workers to projects and classifications. Every payroll after that, the same export returns as a finished WH-347 with the Statement of Compliance staged for your signature and a DIR eCPR XML that passes validation, rates sanity checked against the project's published prevailing wage determination, a person reviewing every file. Gusto stays exactly as it is. We never touch your pay runs, taxes, or money.
Pricing, published
$995 one time setup. $249 per month flat for crews up to 25 workers, every project, every weekly filing, both forms. Crews of 26 to 50: $449 per month. First weekly filing free, done on your own live project before you pay anything. Between public works jobs, pause and pay nothing until the next award.