Home / Compliance desk
Public works · LA County and Southern California
Five to fifty people, public work in Southern California. Somebody in your office is chasing certificates at nine at night, checking DIR numbers against a roster, re-reading a wage determination they have already read twice. That is the job we take. We also print what it costs. Of the fourteen California prevailing-wage and labor-compliance firms whose sites I could open and read on August 19, 2026, eleven publish no price of any kind. The three that do publish sell training, templates, certification paperwork, and a compliance-support subscription — not payroll review. Not one publishes a fixed price for the work itself — reviewing a certified payroll, checking a roster, watching it between audits. Those prices are below.
Who this is for
General contractors running five to fifty people on public work in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino or Riverside County. Big enough that one lapsed certificate or one misclassified hour is a real financial event. Too small to put a compliance officer on the payroll at a Los Angeles salary and keep them busy.
Start here · no cost, no call required
Not a discovery call. Not a proposal. A dated, sourced scorecard on every sub, pulled from public records, in a form that goes straight into the job file. Comes back clean? You owe nothing, and you own written proof it was clean the day you looked.
What gets checked, and by whom. Certificates and lien deadlines are checked by software. CSLB, DIR debarment and SAM exclusions are checked by a person. Every deliverable marks which lines were checked by software and which by a person.
Those caps are real numbers rather than a soft suggestion, and they are applied to everyone the same way. Full detail on the Sub Roster Check page.
Where most contractors start
Each rung stands alone. You can buy the third without the second. The order is only how contractors tend to arrive: a check, then the watching, then the payroll, then the bid desk. Four rungs are the front door, not the whole firm. The rest of the catalogue sits further down this page.
The door-opener · one-time
License, DIR registration, insurance currency, debarment. Every sub on your list read out of the public records and handed back as a dated, sourced scorecard. Past the free ten, or for one sub you want looked at before award, it is priced per sub.
The recurring core · monthly
The watching, continuously. License, insurance and registration status on every sub, tracked as it moves, plus the lien waiver owed against each payment application and the Public Contract Code §7107 retention clock. What lands on your side: a live roster, an alert the day something changes, a monthly report, and the chase letters already drafted for you to send under your own name.
The high-value attach · monthly, per active job
Your own certified payroll, read every week against the DIR determination that governs the job, before you submit it. Base and fringe by craft. Overtime under Labor Code §§1813 and 1815. Apprentice registration and the ratio floor, DAS-140/142 status, travel and subsistence, and the monthly CAC-2 training-fund package. Findings come back with the statute cited and a dollar figure attached.
Episodic · flat fee per package
Bid-walk attendance with a written observation report. Package assembly with every listed sub’s license and DIR number verified before it goes in. Agency prequalification packages, and Public Contract Code §4104 substitution requests. Document preparation only. You are always the bidder of record.
The rest of the firm
These four are what a small GC on public work needs first, nearly every time. Everything else we do is further down, priced the same way.
Every price on this site is the price. Government filing fees, DIR registration fees, and agency portal fees pass through at documented cost with the receipt attached, never marked up.
Rate card effective 2026-08-19 · quotes valid 30 daysHow we compare
We are not going to name other firms and knock them. Below is what this market publishes, what it keeps quiet, and where we land against it. Including the line where we cost more.
| Category | Published price | What it does not cover | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| California labor-compliance consultancies | Eleven of the fourteen firms I could open and read publish nothing and route to a discovery call. Three publish prices, but for training, templates, certification paperwork or a support subscription — not for payroll review or roster monitoring. No firm in that set publishes a fixed price for reviewing a certified payroll, verifying a subcontractor roster, or monitoring a project between audits. | Not applicable. You cannot compare a price you cannot see. | Quote-only |
| Certificate-of-insurance tracking platforms | $13–19per vendor per year, full service | Insurance only. No CSLB license check, no DIR registration, no debarment screening, no lien waivers. | Sourced |
| The one COI platform that publishes a full-service floor | $10,000per year minimum, at $17.80/vendor/yr, with a 6–8 week implementation | Same scope, insurance only. On a real 25–40-sub roster that floor works out to roughly $20.83–33.33 per sub per month. | Sourced |
| Certified-payroll software | from $1,000per month; another vendor from $175/mo plus $995–4,995 setup and $7.50 per report; a third from $500/mo plus $3,000–8,000 implementation | The judgment. Classification, wage determinations, fringe, apprentice ratios and sub-chasing all stay with your staff. A competing payroll bureau puts operating one of these at 8–15 hours per pay period. | Sourced |
| Prequalification and vendor networks | Not publishedan annual subscription billed to your subcontractor, not to you; neither network we checked publishes a rate anywhere on its own site | Generic safety and financial scoring. No California DIR, CSLB, or debarment layer. | Quote-only |
| Prequalification review, human-analyst tier | $30–165per prequalification — charged above a $10,000 annual minimum and $4,200–6,000 of setup | Generic financial and safety scoring; no California public-works layer. | Sourced |
| Pay-application and lien-waiver software | $399per month, up to 10 users | Generates waivers. Does not tell you which statutory form is legally due, or when. | Sourced |
| Our line | Our price | Honest position |
|---|---|---|
| Sub Roster Check | $0capped | I went through fourteen consultancies and fourteen platforms on August 19, 2026. No firm in that set offers a free, no-call check of a certified payroll. The free tiers that do exist are for insurance-certificate tracking, not payroll. |
| One-time vetting, commercial | $175per sub | Per sub, three-sub minimum, no annual commitment and no setup fee. The one published human-analyst band runs $30–165 a review, but above a $10,000 annual minimum and $4,200–6,000 of setup — so a contractor vetting ten subs a year pays that minimum, not ten times $165. What our number adds is the CSLB check plus endorsement-level certificate detail: additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory. |
| Roster Monitoring, public works, 26–50 subs | $2,800per month, about $56/sub/mo | We cost more. Roughly 1.9× the published full-service insurance-tracking rate, for license, DIR registration, apprenticeship status, debarment, retention clock and lien-waiver deadline math the insurance product does not do at any price. If certificate tracking is genuinely all you need, buy the cheaper thing. We will tell you so on the call. |
| Certified Payroll Review, one project | $1,350per month | At or below your true current cost. The software alone starts around $1,000 a month, and that is before the staff time to operate it — a competing payroll bureau puts that at 8–15 hours per pay period, and classification, determinations, fringe and apprentice ratios stay with your people either way. |
| Bid and prequalification packages | $895–5,500flat, per package | One firm publishes certification-package prices — $2,850 for a federal 8(a) package, $1,500 for three DBE/MBE/SBE certificates — but none of the fourteen publishes a price for a bid package or an agency prequalification, so ours is priced on its own scope rather than positioned against a competitor. |
| Open-ended hourly | $225per hour | Where this market publishes an hourly rate at all, it publishes the rate and not the deliverable: one firm posts $85 an hour against “other business services, one-on-one consulting and technical assistance,” re-checked August 20, 2026, with no defined scope attached to the number. Ours is cost-derived, stated openly as a position rather than a market fact. |
How to read this. Every competitor price above comes from the vendor’s own published pricing; the one time figure is a competitor’s published claim and is attributed as one in the notes below. Third-party estimates were left out rather than repeated as fact, and where a vendor hides the number behind “request a quote,” the table says so instead of guessing. Prices move. I checked these on August 18–19, 2026, and I date them so you can tell when I last looked.
The part most firms leave out
Aeternus Dynamics LLC is a California limited liability company, active on the Secretary of State register, EIN issued, SAM.gov registration pending. It is 100% minority-owned. There is one person here. I take the call, I make the judgment calls, and my name goes on the work.
Behind him, three years of business development inside a licensed general contractor: bid walks, complete public-works bid packages start to finish, sub onboarding, permit pickup, owner’s-representative work. And the checking behind the desk. Every certified payroll is read against the governing DIR wage determination through a statute-cited pre-flight gate, with every finding returned with the statute it is drawn from. A DIR public-works registration check that fails closed — if the registration cannot be unambiguously confirmed Active with a valid expiration, it blocks rather than clears, and says so, an apprenticeship-registration bridge, a certificate-of-insurance store that watches expiry and drafts the renewal request, and lien-deadline arithmetic under Civil Code §§8102, 8204, 8412 and 8414.
Checked by hand today, said up front: CSLB lookup, DIR debarment, SAM exclusions. Every deliverable marks which lines a machine checked and which a person did. We will never present one as the other.
Aeternus Dynamics LLC holds no CSLB contractor license. Nothing on this site is an offer or advertisement to perform construction, repair, improvement, or the supervision of means and methods, and none of it may be read that way (Business and Professions Code §7027.1). Every service described here is documentation, verification, monitoring, review, or preparation.
On work we perform for you, you are the bidder of record and the contractor of record: we never sign your bid, never sign as your contractor of record, and never perform, direct, schedule, or supervise any physical work. We never represent you before the Department of Industrial Relations, the Labor Commissioner, or DLSE, and we do not respond to a Civil Wage and Penalty Assessment on your behalf. We do not opine on whether an insurance policy is adequate — that is your broker’s job. We do not place or broker bonds. We do not file, serve, or enforce a lien: we track the statutory deadlines and prepare preliminary notices, releases and payment-application documents for you or your counsel to execute. We do not issue legal conclusions.
On its own contracts, Aeternus Dynamics does bid and contract directly with public agencies as bidder of record — for the services it lawfully performs, which are compliance administration, documentation, verification, monitoring, and consulting. It is a California limited liability company, 100% minority-owned, with SAM.gov registration pending. The line is construction, not bidding: without a CSLB license, construction, repair, improvement, and the supervision of means and methods are outside its scope for every buyer, public or private.
Aeternus Dynamics is a compliance and advisory firm, not a law firm, not a CPA firm, not an insurance producer, and not an engineering firm. Nothing here is legal advice. Our full scope limits are in the Terms & Disclosures, which form part of every engagement.
Questions we get asked first
No. Aeternus Dynamics LLC holds no CSLB contractor license and does not advertise, offer, bid, perform, or supervise construction, repair, or improvement work of any kind. Every service on this page is documentation, verification, monitoring, review, or preparation. On work we do for you, you remain the bidder of record and the contractor of record — we never sign your bid. On its own contracts, Aeternus does bid and contract directly with public agencies for the compliance and administrative services it lawfully performs; what it never bids or performs, for anyone, is construction.
A price you cannot see is a price you cannot plan around. I checked fourteen California prevailing-wage and labor-compliance firms whose sites I could open and read on August 19, 2026. Eleven publish no figure at all. Three do, and not one of the three prices payroll review: one sells DIR training courses from $29 to $277, one publishes a small-business certification fee schedule from $29.99 to $5,000, and one sells a compliance-support subscription through a public storefront. The software side is cleaner still. Not one certified-payroll or prevailing-wage platform — LCPtracker, eBacon, Points North, eMars, Miter — publishes a price at all; I re-checked every one of their pricing pages on August 20, 2026 and they 404 or redirect to a homepage. Not one firm or platform in either set publishes a fixed price for reviewing a certified payroll, verifying a roster, or monitoring one between audits — the work on this page. Publishing cuts both ways. If the number does not work for you, you find that out in ten seconds instead of after a two-hour meeting.
Yes. Aeternus Dynamics LLC is a California limited liability company, 100% minority-owned, active on the Secretary of State register with an EIN issued and SAM.gov registration pending, and it bids and contracts in its own name for the services it lawfully performs — compliance administration, documentation, verification, monitoring, and consulting. What it never bids or performs, for any buyer, is construction: the firm holds no CSLB license, so construction, repair, improvement, and the supervision of means and methods sit outside its scope entirely.
The free Sub Roster Check is a real deliverable on your own subs, back in two business days, before you have paid anything or booked a meeting. The recurring lines run on a three-month minimum and then terminate for convenience on thirty days’ written notice, written into the engagement letter. Certified Payroll Review carries a first-month findings guarantee: if the first full month turns up zero findings on a payroll you believed was clean, that month is free.
No. We do not replace your payroll system, your accounting package, or your project-management platform, and we do not ask you to migrate anything. We review what you already produce, before you submit it.
No. Submission stays in your own DIR eCPR, LCPtracker or eMars account, under your own credentials and your own certification. That certification is a sworn statement by the contractor and it should stay one. We review the payroll and return findings with the Labor Code citation before you submit. If you want us working inside your portal account on a project, that is a separate, priced add-on, never something we quietly absorb.
No. Aeternus Dynamics is not a law firm, does not provide legal advice, does not represent anyone before DIR or DLSE, and does not issue legal conclusions. Findings are delivered with the statute cited, so that you and your counsel can act on them.
Both, in that order. The mechanical checks run first, then a person reads every finding before it reaches you, makes every judgment call, takes the phone call and signs off. Every deliverable tells you which lines were checked by software and which by a person.
We can, with a stated surcharge outside Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Awarding-body practice differs, and on a bid walk the travel time is real. Better to price that in the open than bury it in a quote.
Yes. Each line stands alone. If you take both monitoring and certified payroll for the same client, the smaller of the two is discounted 10%, because the roster, the wage determinations, and the standing call are already paid for once.
Configure and sign it yourself → Pick the services, see the estimate, sign online.
Aeternus Dynamics uses AI-assisted tools to help prepare and check compliance documents; all deliverables are reviewed by a qualified human before submission or use. Aeternus Dynamics is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Prices on this page are the current published rates for the four Compliance Desk packages, effective 2026-08-19. Individual service pages elsewhere on this site list older per-line rates from our service registry; where they differ, this rate card governs. See our Terms & Disclosures.
Ten subs, two business days, no cost and no call. A spreadsheet, a PDF, a photo of the bid tab, or the names typed into a box all work.
Start the roster checkOr email it to hello@aeternusdynamics.com