Sage Timberline Office has the single largest market share among construction job costing, accounting and payroll software products, according to the 2008 Construction Financial Management Association IT survey. While Sage's accounting software has plenty of depth and breadth out of the box, there are always more functions companies may want that aren’t necessarily part of the Timberline Office package. In order to fill those needs, there are Sage business partners that supply this additional functionality with software and, in some cases, hardware.

One area in particular where users may want additional functionality is to track payroll, time and attendance data on the job site. Sage Timberline Office lists nine vendors that focus on time reporting software and payroll tracking software. Four will be discussed in this three-part article. Three vendors -- Austin Lane, Data-Maxx and mJobTime -- provide field data collection software and then integrate that data with Timberline Office. The other product, from Integrated Design, bridges the gaps that might exist between Timberline and services such as payroll tracking software.

The challenge of construction payroll

Construction payroll has always been a challenging business function. It isn’t just the fact that it requires the collecting of information from people who are often a long way from the office; it also requires flowing the data to various accounting functions. When multiple people perform multiple functions on multiple jobs, the need for accurate time and attendance tracking, not only for individual jobs but also for different kinds of work, is an integral part in assessing job profitability. Ultimately, construction payroll completes a circle by tying real-world labor costs to the estimating function. But without accurate payroll reporting throughout jobs, it is unlikely the company can produce accurate cost estimates that are competitive at the beginnings of jobs.

For companies that use Sage Timberline Office, a number of third-party payroll tracking and time reporting software tools are available.

One key market for these plug-ins is mobile technology. While Sage Timberline Office is indeed robust, and can be used for construction project management and cost estimating as well as job cost acocunting, “It is designed to be in the office and networked together with PCs, ” noted Austin Beaty, president of Austin Lane Technologies Inc. in Denton, Texas. Companies like Austin Lane, suppliers of data gathering technologies that interface with Timberline, and Data-Maxx Technologies Inc., which provides software for mobile workforces, step in once a business needs to begin collecting data from disparate locations, as is the case often in construction.

”When our clients get Timberline Office, they certainly have all their accounting software, but sometimes they need ways of collecting the information to feed into that software,” said Jeannie Brantley, president of Bonita Springs, Florida-based Data-Maxx. “We provide ways for them to collect information such as labor time in the field, clocking in and clocking out their employees, and being able to link tasks within the jobs.”

Going beyond Sage Timberline Office

Besides payroll tracking or time reporting software that is designed to be directly tied to Sage Timberline Office, there is also middleware that hooks time reporting and payroll tracking functionality to Timberline. Integrated Design Inc. (IDI) in Ann Arbor, Mich., is one company that develops this middleware.

 “We focus on providing connections that extend the Timberline offering to complement either technical gaps, or functional gaps, through our  partnerships with some of the leaders in the industry," said Kit Dickinson, IDI president.

Compliance with federal and state labor requirements, he added, is one area where IDI software comes into play for Sage Timberline Office users. The company has partnered with Automatic Data Processing Inc., a Roseland, New Jersey-based company that supplies time and attendance tracking software for construction businesses. Because there are "known gaps" in ADP's feature set when it is used in conjunction with Timberline,IDI developed what Dickinson said is "proven integration that allows the client to benefit from the aspects of both products."

In this section, we introduced several time reporting and payroll tracking software plug-ins for Timberline. In the next installment of this article, Field data collection with Sage Timberline Office plug-ins, we explore these products more.