Four situations
Does this describe you?
Four situations Counterline fits. Each one says what the product produces, not what the outcome will be.
The four situations
- 01
A contractor whose crews move between classes during the term
A framing crew spends part of the year on commercial work and part on residential. Somebody in operations knows the week the move happened. The payroll ledger records the hours, not the class, and the reallocation is agreed in a conversation that leaves no dated trace.
Twelve months later the auditor assigns the whole crew to one class, because one class is what the record supports. The argument you want to make is a date, and a date is exactly what you do not have in writing.
Counterline produces a dated register entry for each reclassification, effective from the date the work changed rather than the date it was discovered, and a recomputation that applies the rate differential from that effective date.
- 02
An employer whose subcontractors are not consistently certificated
Certificates of insurance arrive at the start of a relationship and are filed. They expire in the middle of an open purchase order, while the work continues and the invoices keep being coded.
At audit, labor paid to an uninsured subcontractor is reclassified onto your own payroll at your own class rate. The gap is measured in months, and the charge is calculated against the whole of it.
Counterline produces a live exposure figure from the day a certificate lapses until the day a valid one is filed, with both the flag and its resolution kept visible in the register.
- 03
A multi entity group where payroll is allocated after the fact
Three entities share a workforce and a payroll system. The allocation between them is produced at quarter end, by a controller working from cost centers, and revised when a cost center turns out to have been coded wrongly.
The revision is the problem, not the allocation. When the audited figures are assembled, nobody can say which version of the allocation was in force on which date, so the version the auditor sees is the last one.
Counterline produces one register per term across the entities, with every allocation change entered as a dated, signed entry, and corrections made by reverse entry rather than by rewriting the original.
- 04
An employer who received an audit invoice and has three weeks to answer it
The worksheet arrives with a total and a short list of class lines. The window to dispute it is short, and the work of answering it starts with reconstructing what the exposure actually was.
Disputes turn on payroll allocation, class code assignment, subcontractor charges and missing documentation. Answering one means putting a figure and a rule next to each line the carrier printed.
Counterline produces a line by line recomputation of the worksheet you received, each result carrying the arithmetic and the rule that produced it, and stops rather than producing an amount where a rule is missing or unverified.