A developer's payroll is a job cost before it is anything else

Payroll as a job cost, not an overhead line

Time worked by a project manager, site superintendent or site administrator generally capitalizes into the inventory cost of the project it supports rather than expensing immediately as selling and administrative cost — the same logic that capitalizes construction interest under section 18(3.1) applies to labour tied directly to getting a project built. That means timesheets coded by project and phase are not a nice-to-have; they decide which project absorbs the cost and when it becomes deductible, which for inventory is generally when the related units are sold. We set payroll up to capture that project code at the source, in the pay run itself, rather than reconstructing it from memory during a phase closeout. A superintendent who splits a week between finishing one phase and starting the excavation on the next needs that split recorded in the week it happened, because retroactive estimates rarely survive a close look at a project's actual margin.

One employer, several joint-venture partners

When a project runs as a joint venture among two or more corporate participants, one of them — often a dedicated management company — is usually the actual employer of record for the shared site team, running the CRA payroll account, remitting source deductions and carrying the WSIB coverage. The employer burden, wages plus the employer's share of CPP, EI and WSIB, is then cross-charged to the other participants according to their stated interest, typically under a written cost-sharing or management agreement rather than an informal understanding. Whether that cross-charge attracts GST/HST depends on how the arrangement is structured and whether a co-venturer election is in place — a question we settle before the first pay run, not after the first invoice goes out. Getting the cross-charge structure wrong is not just an administrative headache — it can misstate each partner's actual cost of the project and complicate how their share of the eventual profit is calculated at closing.

WSIB clearances now sit between your crew and your money

Construction subcontractors still receive T5018 slips rather than T4s, and WSIB coverage remains mandatory for independent operators and sole proprietors on an Ontario construction site, not just employees — ground already familiar to any residential builder. What changes at development scale is leverage: lenders and lawyers overseeing progress draws frequently will not release funds without current WSIB clearance certificates on file for every trade active on site, which makes a missing clearance a cash-flow problem for the whole project, not just a compliance gap for one sub, and can hold up trades queued behind it too. We hold clearances alongside the vendor file and refresh them on the same cycle as the draw schedule, so a lapsed certificate is caught internally before a lender's inspector finds it during a site visit. The staffing side of a project's cost feeds directly into the job-costing and margin work covered on our developer bookkeeping page, and the general payroll engagement is on our payroll services page.

One exemption, shared across several project corporations

Developers who use a separate corporation for each phase or project, as many do for liability reasons, often assume each one gets its own fresh Ontario Employer Health Tax exemption. It does not work that way once corporations are associated for tax purposes — associated employers share a single EHT exemption amount, allocated between them by agreement, so payroll across a family of project corporations needs to be tracked as a group, not entity by entity, to avoid claiming more exemption than the group is entitled to.

Seasonal layoffs are common at development sites between a fall closeout and a spring restart, and the mechanics mirror any construction employer's: a Record of Employment coded for shortage of work, with a documented rehire in the spring rather than a fresh hire, keeps the employment relationship and any accrued entitlements intact through the gap.

Source: WSIB — Coverage in the construction industry.