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How To Handle Variable Pay Rates With Workyard & Quickbooks Desktop

Step by step instructions on capturing time worked and handling variable pay rates using Workyard & Quickbooks Desktop

Written by Christina Kao

Davis Bacon, government work, and prevailing wages. There are a lot of reasons you may find yourself managing variable pay rates for your employees on certain projects.

Workyard's seamless integration with Quickbooks Desktop makes setting up and managing variable pay easy. This article presents step by step on how to do it.

You'll need to use Workyard's Workforce Management tier and Quickbooks Desktop for this to work.

Step 1

Set Up Projects in Workyard

You'll need to set up projects in Workyard, so your employees can tag their time. Here's an article on how to do that.

Workyard passes your employee's time worked on each of those projects over to Quickbooks Desktop, so you can easily see time spent on each job. This is important because it will allow you to flag the projects where variable pay rates are required.

Step 2

Connect Workyard to Quickbooks Desktop

Next you'll need to connect your Workyard account to Quickbooks Desktop. Here's a help article that walks you through that process.

We're also here to help you with this step, so just click the little chat button in the lower right of your screen at any time to send our team a message.

Step 3

Updating the Pay Rate on a Weekly Timesheet Line

After Workyard exports your time to QuickBooks Desktop, each project/cost-code combination lands as its own line item on the employee's Weekly Timesheet. To assign or change the pay rate on any line:

  1. Open the timesheet: Employees → Enter Time → Use Weekly Timesheet, and select the employee and week.

  2. Find the line item for the project/service item you want to adjust (e.g., a prevailing-wage or Davis-Bacon job).

  3. Click into that row's Payroll Item column — it's a dropdown.

  4. Select the correct variable pay rate from the list (e.g., "Prevailing - San Mateo") instead of the default "Hourly."

  5. Repeat for any other line items that need a different rate that week.

  6. Click Save & Close (or Save & New to move to the next employee) to lock in the change.

Note: each payroll item shown in the dropdown must already exist in QuickBooks — if the rate you need isn't listed, it has to be set up first under the employee's Payroll Info as a new payroll item (Hourly Wages type) before it'll appear here.

If you have any questions about how to support variable pay rates using Workyard and Quickbooks Desktop don't hesitate to contact us!

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