Home / Compliance desk / Roster & payables monitoring
Rung two · the recurring core
Somebody watching the roster every day, so nobody has to remember to.
Licenses expire. Certificates lapse. DIR registrations run out on June 30 and nobody notices until the awarding body does. This is the standing job of watching every sub’s credentials, and every lien waiver against every pay application, then telling you the day something changes rather than the month after.
Why it matters
A one-time check is a photograph. The exposure is a film. Under Labor Code §1777.7(e), a prime contractor’s protection from a sub’s apprenticeship violation turns on having continually monitored that sub, and on holding a signed compliance declaration before final payment. That is not marketing language. That is the statute describing this job.
Two tiers
Commercial, or public works. The second one is the first one plus the public-works layer.
Everything is checked against your subcontract requirements, not a generic template. A certificate that satisfies somebody else’s contract is not evidence that it satisfies yours.
Commercial tier: what is watched
- CSLB license status, classification, and expiry on every sub
- Certificate of insurance currency and endorsement match against your own subcontract: additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory
- W-9 and taxpayer-identification file completeness
- Business license status
- A rolling expiry calendar, with the chase letter drafted before the lapse, not after
Public-works tier: everything above, plus
- DIR public-works contractor registration under Labor Code §1725.5, per sub, per tier
- Apprenticeship-registration status, and the skilled-and-trained workforce graduation-percentage cross-reference where Public Contract Code §2601 applies
- DIR debarment and federal SAM exclusions screening on every sweep
- Lien-waiver tracking against every payment application: conditional and unconditional, progress and final, under Civil Code §§8132, 8134, 8136 and 8138, matched to the pay app it belongs to
- Public Contract Code §7107 retention-clock tracking, including the seven-day pass-through to subs
What lands on your desk
Three things, on a schedule you can plan around.
A live roster
One place where every sub’s current status sits, with the source and pull date on every line. When your PM asks whether a sub can be on site Monday, the answer takes ten seconds instead of an afternoon.
Exception alerts, as they happen
You do not get a weekly digest of things that are fine. You get told when something changes: a lapse, an expiry inside the warning window, a new debarment listing, a waiver that does not match the pay app it was submitted against.
A monthly report, and the letters already drafted
A dated compliance report for the file, plus the renewal and chase correspondence already written. You send it, under your own name, to your own subs. That relationship is yours, and we are not going to email people as you.
Pricing
Banded by roster size. Every band published.
Monitoring is driven by exceptions, not headcount. A six-sub roster and a sixty-sub roster are set up, watched and reported the same way; what varies is how much changes. So the bands step rather than multiply, and the small-roster band carries a higher effective per-sub rate.
| Roster size | Monthly | Effective per sub |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 subs | $575 | from $57.50/sub at ten |
| 11–25 subs | $875 | from $35.00/sub at twenty-five |
| 26–50 subs | $1,375 | from $27.50/sub at fifty |
| 51+ subs | $1,375plus $22 per sub per month over fifty | marginal rate |
| Roster size | Monthly | Effective per sub |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 subs | $850 | from $85.00/sub at ten |
| 11–25 subs | $1,600 | from $64.00/sub at twenty-five |
| 26–50 subs | $2,800 | from $56.00/sub at fifty |
| 51+ subs | $2,800plus $50 per sub per month over fifty | marginal rate |
Minimum engagement: a three-month initial term, then month-to-month on thirty days’ written notice. We do not sell single months. Monitoring with no history is a one-time check, and it is priced as one on the roster-check page. Discounts we will actually give: 10% for a twelve-month commitment paid quarterly in advance, 12% for annual prepay in full, and 10% off the smaller line if you take this and certified payroll together. Surcharges we will tell you about before you sign, not after: +20% where the job runs more than two tiers of lower-tier subs, +15% outside Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and +25% where more than one union collective bargaining agreement is represented on the roster.
| What you could buy instead | Published price | What it leaves you doing |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance-tracking platform, full service | $13–19per vendor per year | Insurance only. No CSLB, no DIR registration, no debarment, no lien waivers, no retention clock. Sourced |
| Insurance-tracking platform with a published full-service floor | $10,000per year minimum at $17.80/vendor/yr, plus a 6–8 week implementation | Same scope. On a real 25–40-sub roster that floor is roughly $20.83–33.33 per sub per month. The floor, not the rate, is the price you actually pay. Sourced |
| Self-service certificate tracking | $3–30per sub per year | All of the chasing and all of the judgment. The software stores documents; your staff still reads them. 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 |
| A California labor-compliance consultancy | Not published. Of fourteen firms I could open and read on August 19, 2026, none published a fixed rate for ongoing roster monitoring. One sells a compliance-support subscription through a public storefront, which answers questions but does not monitor a roster. | Unknown until you have spent the meeting. Quote-only |
Where we cost more, said out loud. At 26–50 subs our public-works tier is $2,800 a month. That works out near $56 per sub per month, roughly 1.9× the published full-service insurance-tracking rate. We charge it because the insurance product does not check a CSLB license, does not check DIR registration, does not screen debarment, does not track apprenticeship status, and does not know that a conditional progress waiver went in where an unconditional one was due. If certificate tracking is genuinely all you need, the cheaper product is the right purchase and we will say so rather than sell you this.
$850 a month watches every sub on the job: license, insurance, DIR registration, debarment, and every lien waiver against every pay application.
Public-works tier, 1–10 subs · rate card effective 2026-08-19Scope and license, stated plainly
Aeternus Dynamics LLC holds no CSLB contractor license. This page is not an offer or advertisement to perform construction, repair, improvement, or the supervision of means and methods, and it may not be read as one (Business and Professions Code §7027.1). This service is monitoring, verification, and documentation only.
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 do not opine on whether an insurance policy or its limits are adequate — we report what the certificate says and what is missing against your own subcontract, and your broker owns the coverage decision. We do not file, serve, or enforce a lien or a preliminary notice; we track the deadline and prepare the document for you or your counsel to execute. We do not represent you before DIR or DLSE and do not issue legal conclusions. Aeternus Dynamics is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. See our Terms & Disclosures.
Questions
What people ask before signing.
Which tier do I need?
If any job on your books is public work, you need the public-works tier for that roster. DIR registration, apprenticeship status and debarment are the lines that stop a job, and none of them sit in the commercial tier. Purely private commercial? Then the commercial tier is the honest answer, and we will not push you past it.
What if my roster size changes mid-term?
Bands are checked monthly against the actual roster. Crossing a band moves you to that band the following month, in both directions. You are not billed for subs you demobilised.
Do you replace my project-management or accounting software?
No, and we do not ask you to migrate anything. This sits alongside whatever you already run. If your system already holds the certificates, we work from that.
Do you chase my subcontractors directly?
Only if you instruct us to in writing, and even then it goes out under your name with you copied. Drafting the letter is our job; the relationship with your trade partners is yours.
Can you get us out of a lien?
No. We track the statutory deadlines and prepare the documents; filing, serving, releasing, or enforcing anything is executed by you or your counsel. That boundary is deliberate and it does not move.
Why is the small-roster band so much per sub?
Because roster administration, the monthly report and the standing call cost the same whether you have six subs or sixty. About an hour and a half a month, either way. Better to show you that arithmetic than pretend the price is linear.
What if we want to work inside our own compliance portal?
That is a priced add-on of $250 per month per project, not something we absorb quietly. Working inside an agency or third-party portal account, under your credentials and on your instruction, is a distinct scope from monitoring the roster, so it carries a distinct price.
What happens if we want out?
After the three-month minimum, thirty days’ written notice, no reason required, written into the engagement letter. You get your roster data and every report we produced.
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 Compliance Desk, effective 2026-08-19, and govern where they differ from older per-line rates listed elsewhere on this site. Competitor figures are the vendors’ own published prices, checked August 19, 2026; where a vendor does not publish, that is stated rather than estimated. See our Terms & Disclosures.
Start with the free check on the same roster.
Ten subs, two business days, no cost. If the scorecard shows you why the roster needs watching, monitoring is the next conversation. If it comes back clean, you have a dated record and owe nothing.
Start the roster checkOr email it to hello@aeternusdynamics.com · Back to the compliance desk