Certified payroll in QuickBooks: your options for the WH-347

QuickBooks is the books and payroll system for a lot of small construction subcontractors. When one of them lands a Davis-Bacon or prevailing-wage job, the question comes up fast: can QuickBooks produce the weekly certified payroll, or does it have to be done somewhere else?

The answer depends on which QuickBooks you run and which plan you are on. This guide lays out the routes Intuit describes, what the WH-347 needs that your payroll reports may not hold, and a routine for doing it from QuickBooks reports when your plan does not do it for you.

What Intuit offers, by product

Intuit's products and plans change, so treat this as a starting point and confirm against your own account.

QuickBooks Desktop Payroll. Intuit's help article "Create prevailing wages and certified payroll reports in QuickBooks Desktop Payroll" describes setting up prevailing wage payroll items and job costing, then running an Excel-based Certified Payroll Report, which needs a full version of Microsoft Excel. Intuit notes the report changed to follow DOL's 2025 update of the WH-347.

QuickBooks Online, Workforce Elite plan. Intuit's Firm of the Future blog (June 2026) says QuickBooks Workforce Elite generates a WH-347 certified payroll report as an Excel file, pre-filled from payroll, time and project records, and that it is not included in the Workforce Payroll or Workforce Premium plans. The same article lists fields you still enter yourself, including the project ID, wage determination number, payroll week number, apprentice details and the signature. QuickBooks generates the report; you submit it.

Other QuickBooks Online payroll plans. If your plan does not include the report, the payroll data is still there. You build the WH-347 from your reports, by hand or with a separate tool.

Whichever route you take, you still certify page 2, and some agencies or primes require their own portal or a state format instead of the WH-347. Ask before you pick a route.

What the WH-347 needs that payroll reports may not hold

The pay columns are the easy part. Hours by project and classification are where the work is, and they decide whether the form is right.

Building it from QuickBooks reports

If your plan does not produce the WH-347, a weekly routine looks like this.

1. Export the pay data

Run a payroll report at the employee level for the paycheck that covers the workweek, such as a payroll details report, and export it to Excel or CSV. Check that it has:

• Employee name and an employee ID or the last four digits of the SSN (never put a full SSN on the WH-347)
• Regular and overtime hours and pay
• Gross pay
• Federal and state income tax withholding
• Social Security and Medicare
• Each other deduction
• Net pay

Save the report's settings once you have the columns right, so next week is one click.

2. Export the hours by project

If your crew tracks time in QuickBooks Time or QuickBooks's own timesheets against a customer or project, export the week's entries with date, employee, project and hours. If hours are on paper, put them in a simple grid: workers down the side, days across the top, one grid per project, plus a row for hours on other jobs.

That last row matters. On contracts covered by the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act, DOL's instructions count all of a worker's hours in the week toward overtime, including hours on other jobs. A worker with 30 hours on a private remodel and 16 on your federal job has worked 46, so 6 of them are overtime.

3. Match and fill

For each covered project, list the workers with hours on it, set each one's classification from the wage determination, and fill the WH-347 columns: daily hours, totals, rate paid, fringe credit or cash in lieu, gross for the project, then the pay columns from the payroll export. The WH-347 instructions explain each column.

4. Check before you sign

• Every rate is at least the wage determination's base rate for that classification.
• Rate plus fringe credit plus cash in lieu covers base plus fringe.
• Overtime is paid at 1.5 times the rate.
• Hours on the payroll report match the timesheet totals.
• Gross for all work minus total deductions equals net pay.
• Gross on this project is not more than gross for all work.

Setting up QuickBooks to make this easier

Even if you build the report outside QuickBooks, a few settings save time every week:

• Track time by project. Hours tagged to a customer or project at entry time are the single biggest time saver.
• Use a consistent employee ID. Matching the payroll report to the timesheet is easier with an ID than with names that are spelled two ways.
• Pay prevailing-wage hours at the right rate in the paycheck. If a worker earns a higher rate on the federal job, set that up so the paycheck reflects it; the WH-347 shows what was actually paid.
• Keep fringe contributions identifiable. If you claim a fringe credit, you need the hourly cost of each plan for page 2.

How Cert Pay Weekly works with QuickBooks

Cert Pay Weekly reads the export rather than connecting to your QuickBooks account. You upload the QuickBooks Online payroll details report as a CSV or XLSX file, plus hours by project from a timesheet export such as QuickBooks Time or from a weekly grid. You confirm the columns once and it remembers the layout. It produces one WH-347 per prevailing-wage project, ready for your signature, flags missing classifications and pay below your wage determination's rates before you sign, and emails reminders until you mark each report submitted. It produces the federal WH-347 PDF; it does not file to LCPtracker or state portals today.