WageTime is payroll for MSPs and IT services firms: on-call, night, and after-hours pay run as pay codes, not a spreadsheet, and every tech’s hour can carry a cost coded to the managed client it served.
Computer systems design and related services runs about 423,115 US establishments (BLS QCEW, Q4 2024), and most MSPs are small: an owner, a service manager, a help desk, a couple of engineers, and a night NOC that never closes. Good operators keep techs at 65-70% billable, average shops sit at 55-60% (industry benchmarks), so every non-billable hour is labor you paid and could not attach to a contract. The classification line, the on-call clock, and the cert ladder all run straight through payroll, and generic payroll flattens them into one salaried blob.
IT has its own overtime exemption, and your front line usually falls outside it. The computer-employee exemption covers systems analysis and the design, development, and testing of systems or programs, on salary or at $27.63 an hour or more. A help-desk or field tech who installs, configures, and troubleshoots to a runbook is doing support work, which is non-exempt no matter what the business card says. Pay them a flat salary and skip the overtime, and the back pay is real.
You sell round-the-clock monitoring, so someone is always on call and someone is always working the overnight shift. Federal rules can turn restricted on-call time into paid time, and a 2am callout is time worked. Night, weekend, and holiday differentials pile on top. On per-run-priced payroll, that after-hours check becomes another invoice, so the pay gets batched, delayed, or dropped until a tech notices.
The managed-services agreement bills a flat monthly fee. The labor behind it is anything but flat: one ransomware scare or one needy client eats a week of tech time no one costed. Report margin off a single blended rate and a heavy-touch contract and a set-it-and-forget-it one look identical, so the account quietly bleeding hours never shows up until renewal.
Compensation here is cert-driven: CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, and cloud certs carry a 15-30% premium, and plenty of MSPs pay a cert bonus or a rate bump the day a tech passes. Then the cert lapses on its recertification clock, and the pay tied to it, plus the client requirement it satisfied, quietly falls out of date on a spreadsheet nobody rereads.
You cover the metro with your own W-2 team and dispatch 1099 field technicians for the sites and overflow you can’t reach. That is a mixed run every period: salaried engineers, hourly techs with overtime, and independent field contractors settled together, each with different tax treatment and different year-end forms, reconciled by hand against a pile of dispatch tickets.
How do you pay a shop where the roster is salaried, hourly, and freelance in the same two weeks? WageTime runs the engineers, the help desk, and the 1099 field techs together, with W-2s and 1099s both included at year-end.
Replaces the dispatch-ticket pile, the mileage sheet, and the contractor invoices that never agree with the register.
How do you pay for 24/7 coverage without rebuilding it by hand every week? On-call pay and night, weekend, and holiday differentials are pay codes inside WageTime, so the overnight NOC shift and the Saturday callout carry their premium automatically.
Replaces the monthly ritual where someone scrolls the on-call calendar and rebuilds who is owed a differential.
Are your technicians exempt from overtime? Some are: the computer-employee exemption covers systems analysis and program design, on salary or at $27.63 an hour or more, while the help-desk tech troubleshooting to a spec is generally non-exempt; WageTime prices whichever hours you classify.
| Person | Classification | OT this period |
|---|---|---|
| Priya Rao systems engineerSystems design & analysis | Exempt computer employee | n/a |
| Devon Pruitt NOC engineerMonitoring to a runbook | Non-exempt | 6 OT hrs |
| Marcus Bell help-desk leadTicket triage, troubleshooting | Non-exempt | 4 OT hrs |
| Sasha Kim junior techImaging & installs to spec | Non-exempt | 5 OT hrs |
Replaces the back-pay math someone does after a “why wasn’t my salaried help-desk lead getting overtime” conversation.
Which managed-services client is quietly eating your margin? WageTime costs each contract from the payroll you actually ran, so the heavy-touch account and the quiet one stop looking alike against the same fixed monthly fee.
| Client / contract | Techs | Hours | Labor cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meridian Health MERID-MSA | 5 | 168.0 | $6,720.00 |
| Cornerstone Legal CORN-MSA | 3 | 96.5 | $3,860.00 |
| Blue Ridge Mfg BLUE-PROJ | 4 | 140.0 | $6,300.00 |
| Internal / non-billable INT-NB | 6 | 88.0 | $3,520.00 |
Replaces the renewal-week scramble to figure out whether the flat fee ever covered the hours.
How do you keep cert pay and expiring credentials from drifting out of date? The bonus a tech earned for passing Security+ runs as a WageTime pay code the next cycle, and the credential itself sits on the employee record, alerted before it lapses.
Replaces the credential spreadsheet that only gets opened after a client audit asks for it.
Full-service payroll is $10 a month per person paid that month, plus $50 a month per company, with unlimited runs. No long-term contracts, no per-run charges.
Off-cycle runs and bonuses cost nothing extra. No long-term contracts; cancel anytime.
Example: 50 people paid × $10 + $50 company = $550 for the month
HR & hiring, onboarding, PTO, time tracking, benefits, and workers’ comp are optional add-ons, priced separately when you’re ready.
See a demoOften not. The computer-employee exemption covers systems analysis and the design, development, or testing of systems and programs, paid on salary or at $27.63 an hour or more. Help-desk, support, and field techs who install and troubleshoot to a spec are generally non-exempt, and the title does not decide it. Whether a role qualifies is your call with counsel.
Often yes. Federal rules treat restricted on-call time as hours worked, and an after-hours callout is time worked. Whether a given on-call block counts is fact-specific and your determination. In WageTime, on-call pay and night, weekend, and holiday differentials run as pay codes, and overtime computes on the weighted-average rate automatically.
In WageTime, night, weekend, and holiday shift differentials are configured as pay codes inside payroll, so an overnight NOC shift carries its premium automatically. When a tech works a desk rate and a differential-boosted night rate in the same week, overtime is priced on the weighted-average regular rate, so the premium is in the OT math instead of left out of it.
Yes. WageTime codes hours and pay to client and contract codes, up to 40 alphanumeric characters adjustable to your numbering, so labor cost reports per managed client from actual payroll rather than one blended rate. Non-billable and internal time shows as its own line, so a flat-fee contract’s real staffing margin is visible before you renew it.
In WageTime, a cert bonus or cert-tied premium runs as a custom pay code alongside wages, and the credential lives on the employee record with expiration alerts at 30, 60, and 90 days. The bump is paid the next cycle, and a lapsing CompTIA or Cisco cert surfaces before it expires. How much a cert is worth is your comp decision to configure.
$50 a month for the company plus $10 for each person actually paid that month: 20 people paid is $250 in a normal month. Runs are unlimited, so a semi-monthly cadence, the after-hours callout check, and the cert bonus all cost exactly what the formula says. No long-term contracts; cancel anytime.
The overnight NOC rotation, the help-desk lead you’re not sure is exempt, the 1099 field tech you dispatched last week, and the managed client whose margin never quite adds up. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you’ll see a mixed W-2 and 1099 run, on-call and shift pay as pay codes, and labor cost coded to each client contract.
Book a 20-minute demo