There's a moment in construction payroll where someone — a real human being — sits down, opens a PDF form, and starts keying in numbers by hand. Not in 1997. Right now. Today. For a huge chunk of the trades market, that's still the prevailing-wage workflow required for certified payroll.
OK, be honest: did you have any idea what a prevailing-wage workflow was? Or certified payroll? Because … I did not.
Coray Grove has spent decades in payroll and HCM, watching this problem not get solved. He didn't stumble into the trades — he grew up in a construction household. He spent seven years at ADP's major accounts division, then founded Integrated Payroll Services (IPS) in St. Louis in 2005.
What started as a general regional payroll shop eventually went deep into the trades vertical, and that specialization paid off. IPS was acquired by Inova, where Coray became CRO, and by the time Inova was sold to UKG late last year, roughly 15% of the business was trades-focused. But there was still one thing.
“I recognized one particular area that was really a challenge that I could never properly solve for, and most HCMs can't solve for in the core product.”
That gap is automating prevailing wage calculations and certified payroll reporting for trades and construction companies. He’s seen it from every angle: the regional shop, the mid-market player, the enterprise rollup. Now he’s closing that gap with his new company: WagePath.
This isn't a pivot — it's the thing Coray kept meaning to fix the whole time.
This is part of what I love about the Work Tech industry. There are still plenty of unsolved huge, tiny problems that remain unsolved and begging for solutions. He’s not doing it just because it’s a flashy wedge into a hot market. It’s because it was genuinely broken and nobody was fixing it.
“I felt like this isn't going away. The amount of money that's going into infrastructure spending in this country is at an all-time high,” Coray explains. “So, there’s a big need for this kind of prevailing wage certified reporting.”
This conversation is about what it takes to solve a deeply unsexy, deeply important problem. Get ready. We’re going all the way down the payroll nerd rabbit hole.
If you're a contractor bidding on federal or state-funded work, prevailing wage compliance is the price of admission.
The requirement itself is straightforward: pay workers the prevailing wage rate for their trade and location, then file certified payroll reports proving you did. Simple enough in theory. A bureaucratic nightmare in practice. And it’s a special kind of terrible when your workforce spans multiple trade classifications, job sites, and funding sources, each with its own rate tables.
Most companies handle it the same way they've always handled it: manually. Payroll staff keying data into PDF forms. Reports filed late — or not at all. Part of the reason you might not want to file? The WH-347 form is literally signed under penalty of perjury — so falsifying a certified payroll report isn't a paperwork violation, it's a federal crime. It can also disqualify you from bidding on government contracts.
Possible jail time? A potential business killer? Yeah, I might skip that form, too.
Coray tells a story about a contractor in Oregon with 300 employees and three legal entities, still manually filling out WH-347 federal reports using an HCM that can't generate them. She still hasn't filed reports from December. “If you can't file the report, the contractors can withhold payment,” Coray explains. “So this company is behind almost three months in receiving money for the labor.”
These aren't edge cases. They're the norm. In 2026.
That’s what blows my mind. I don’t know many small businesses that can wait that long for the money to hit their bank account.
Here's where it gets interesting and where most contractors are leaving real money on the table.
Prevailing wage rates include a fringe-benefit component. If a contractor is already providing benefits (health, retirement, etc.) that meet or exceed the fringe rate, they can offset that amount against their wage obligation. The benefit cost gets credited toward the required total comp — in real time, before the payroll run even happens.
Coray breaks it down: “There are a number of things that you can take and convert those values into an hourly rate equivalency and take those fringe benefits per hour off of that per-hour fringe rate in real time before it ever hits payroll.”
The problem? Most contractors either don't know this is possible or can't calculate it accurately. “Sometimes the easier button is to not do it at all, pay the fringe and move on,” Coray says. Which means they're systematically overpaying on every prevailing wage job they run.
Get it right, and the math shifts. Lower effective labor cost means lower bids. Lower bids mean winning work you couldn't compete for before. “There are a lot of construction companies, as they look at our tech,” Coray adds, “they're like, we can go after this business for the first time.”
A compliance product becomes a business development tool.
WagePath's positioning in the HCM ecosystem is worth paying attention to because it's a model that more niche Work Tech players should consider.
Coray didn't build WagePath to replace your HRIS or your payroll engine. The goal was always something more surgical. “We are never gonna be the system of record for a platform,” he says. “So we have to be able to accept and mold and bring data in and out and make it easy for companies to sort of work with us as the connective tissue for this particular part of the business.”
In a market full of platforms trying to be everything to everyone, that's a deliberate and defensible choice. The generalists can't go deep enough on prevailing wage to solve it well. The construction-specific payroll platforms require full commitment to the vertical. WagePath is the bridge for every HCM in between — the ones that have construction clients but will never truly specialize.
That positioning only works if you can actually build fast. And this is where the timing gets interesting.
WagePath went from concept to sophisticated platform in nine months — a timeline Coray describes as genuinely unthinkable just two years ago. "That kind of product, even a year and a half or two years ago, would've taken two to three years," he says. Today, he can prototype a new feature by branching the code, vibe-coding a working version, and handing it off to his dev team to review and merge.
"I think it's probably, in my opinion, the most exciting time to start a software company that there ever has been." That's not a hype line — it's a practical observation from someone who's done it before. He estimates he's building at a quarter of the cost it would have taken three years ago.
The focused, niche bet only makes sense when you can execute it lean and fast. Right now, you can.
In Work Tech, some of the most durable business opportunities are the ones everyone's been ignoring because they're not exciting enough to pitch on a conference stage.
Certified payroll isn't sexy. It's not AI-native. It's not getting breathless coverage on TechCrunch. It's a compliance requirement that's been handled manually for decades, causing real operational pain for a huge swath of the trades market.
That's exactly why it's interesting.
Payroll people are literally keying data into PDF forms. Contractors are leaving money on the table because the forms were too much of a pain to figure out. Then Coray shows them WagePath. “When they see us just load a payroll file and click generate report, and it generates that state's report or that federal report,” Coray says, “it's just fun to watch, actually.”
That … is maybe not everyone’s idea of fun. But that's a game-changer for a business. It’s also the whole story, right there. Solving a problem that’s been hiding in plain sight, just waiting for someone who gets it and is close enough to the work to finally fix it.