Can construction time tracking export straight into my payroll provider?

Payroll providers fall into two groups, and which group yours is in decides the entire shape of the work. Find out which one you are dealing with before you evaluate a single time tracking product, because it changes what a truthful answer from a vendor even looks like.

If your provider publishes an API, hours move across a connection. The platform sends, the provider acknowledges, and there is a record of what went and what came back. A rejected record surfaces as a rejection rather than as a wrong number in a file nobody reopened.

If your provider does not publish an API, there is no connection to make and no amount of asking will produce one. What exists instead is an import: the provider accepts a file in a specific layout, and something has to produce that file correctly. The work is real in both cases. It is a different kind of work, and it is the second kind that vendors tend to skip.

Patriot Pipeline runs iSolved. iSolved publishes no API. So Eagle 1, the field operations platform we built for them, has a custom export written in iSolved's own import format.

That sentence is doing more work than it appears to. Not a CSV. Not an export with a mapping guide attached for somebody to follow. A file in the layout iSolved expects to ingest, produced by the same platform that recorded the hours in the field, covering a workforce of 114.

Where a provider does publish an API, we integrate directly and the export never gets written. Where one does not, we build the export. The provider decides which of those happens, not us and not the software.

Most field time tracking products export a generic file and consider the feature delivered. On a feature list that is an export. In an office it is a starting point for a person.

Somebody opens it, reorders columns, fixes date formats, splits or merges earnings codes, removes the rows the provider will reject, and uploads. That happens every pay period, permanently, and it is the manual step the product was bought to remove. It is also a manual step performed on payroll data under a deadline, which is the worst place in the business to be retyping anything.

So when a vendor answers "does it work with our payroll provider" with "you can export to CSV", they have answered a different question. Every product can produce a CSV. The question was whether anybody has to touch it.

Ask your payroll provider two things: do you publish an API, and what import formats do you accept. Both answers are short and neither costs anything to obtain.

Then ask any software vendor which of those two things they have built, for your provider, by name. A vendor who has done it can tell you the format. A vendor who has not will talk about flexibility, configurability and mapping tools, all of which are ways of describing work that is going to land back on your office.

Time tracking looks like the simple part of a field operations platform and it is not. Hours captured in the field are the input to payroll, to job costing, and to any later analysis of where labour actually went. The export is the single point at which all of that depends on one file being right.

It is also the part of the system with the least tolerance for being approximately correct, because it resolves into money paid to people on a fixed date. That is why it was written against iSolved specifically rather than against a generic idea of payroll.