Client story · Partner since 2024421-a compliance, from a paper chase to a single portal of truth
Two Trees is a Brooklyn-based, family-owned real estate developer. Since 1968 it has owned, managed and developed a portfolio its own website puts at more than 6,000 residential units and over 4 million square feet of office and retail space.
Two Trees has been a SEAD client since April 2024. The brief was specific: bring 421-a compliance into one place, with the thousands of certified payroll reports and daily sign-in logs from its subcontractors read, checked and ready to stand behind. SEAD built the portal that reads them with AI, routes anything that needs a decision to a person, and shows what was paid, by subcontractor and by month. Six chapters follow.
Proving what every worker was paid
New York City's 421-a program, run by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, is a partial property tax exemption for new multiple dwellings. On eligible rental projects of 300 or more units it carries a wage requirement, enforced by the New York City Comptroller: construction workers must be paid a minimum average hourly wage, with wages and benefits counted together toward it. A developer must be able to show what every subcontractor paid, for the whole build.
The proof lives in documents. Every subcontractor files a certified payroll report for each pay period, and every site keeps a daily sign-in log. At Two Trees those documents run to thousands of pages. A process built on shared folders and a hand-kept spreadsheet could not keep pace. Finance, legal, operations and leadership wanted the same thing: to know at any moment which subcontractor had filed, which had not, and where the firm stood, without a team of people copying figures by hand.
Off-the-shelf software that did this did not exist. It had to read a scanned payroll report, keep the sign-in log as evidence beside it, and hand the result to a person with the numbers already worked out. Two Trees chose to have it built around its own process rather than develop it in-house, and SEAD delivered it as a Co-Wright custom application.
- Certified payroll report, one per subcontractor per pay period
- Daily sign-in log, one per site per day
- Corrected report, signed in DocuSign
- Employee rates and classifications
- Tax rules by subcontractor
- Leave hours: vacation, sick, holiday
Two Trees came to us with a clear priority: make 421-a compliance something they could see and stand behind, across thousands of subcontractor documents. We built the portal to fit that exactly, and that is how we like to start with any partner. Pick one thing that matters, deliver real value, and grow from there.
Read by AI, checked by people, signed when it matters
A report arrives as a scan. The portal finds the payroll table on each page and reads every cell: the employee, the classification, the hours for each day and the pay rate. An AI pass then confirms each value against the scanned page. It also looks for what a careful reader would catch, such as a thousand hours on a single line, and flags it. A page it has seen before is recognized and not loaded twice.
Daily sign-in logs follow the same path. Each page is recognized as a sign-in log, turned right side up, dated, and stored against its subcontractor. For every week a subcontractor files a report, the portal checks that the sign-in logs for that week are on file: the log is the evidence that the people named on the report were on site.
Certified payroll report
One subcontractor, one week
| Line | Employee | Classification | Hours | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Employee A | Class 1 | 40 | read |
| 2 | Employee B | Class 1 | 1,000 | read |
| 3 | Employee C | Class 2 | 32 | read |
- Every cell read from the scanned page and confirmed by the AI pass
- Daily sign-in logs on file for this week
- Line 2 reports 1,000 hours in a single week: a likely data-entry errorfor a person
Flagged for a Two Trees reviewer
- A certified payroll report or daily sign-in log arrives from a subcontractorSubcontractor
- Every cell of the payroll table is read and confirmed against the scanned page by an AI pass: employee, wage and hours
- Sign-in logs are matched to the weeks that have a report and kept as evidence
- An implausible entry, or a total that does not add up, is flagged for a personTwo Trees reviewer
- A report that must be re-recorded on the current 421-a form is prepared from the portal's own data and sent for signature in DocuSignDocuSign
- What was paid, by subcontractor and by month, reaches the dashboardsCo-Wright Intelligence
The portal does the reading; people make the decisions. An implausible value, or a total that does not reconcile, is flagged for a Two Trees reviewer rather than corrected silently. When a subcontractor's report has to be re-recorded on the current 421-a form, the portal prepares the corrected report from its own data and sends it for signature through DocuSign. The record therefore carries the subcontractor's own signature rather than an edit made by SEAD or Two Trees. That split is deliberate: see why we pair AI with human judgment.
Which document is missing, and whose
Every document a subcontractor owes is in one of four states: expected, received, overdue, or received with critical data missing. The first dashboard, the document calendar, shows that state for every subcontractor and every month, so the team reaches a subcontractor the month a document is due, not when an audit asks for it.
| Month 1 | Month 2 | Month 3 | Month 4 | Month 5 | Month 6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subcontractor A | ||||||
| Subcontractor B | ||||||
| Subcontractor C | ||||||
| Subcontractor D | ||||||
| Subcontractor E |
- Received
- Expected
- Overdue
- Received, data missing
The dashboards were first delivered in Tableau, which SEAD supports, and are moving to Co-Wright Intelligence, SEAD's own AI-enabled dashboarding tool.
The document calendar, redrawn in Co-Wright Intelligence: one row per subcontractor, one column per month, a mark where a document has arrived or needs a follow-up, and above it four figures for the whole record: total pay, total hours, hourly rate and potential shortfall.
What each subcontractor actually paid per hour
421-a compliance turns on a rate, so the second dashboard, the site KPI, is a rate table. One row per subcontractor shows hours, total wages, the wage rate per hour, the benefit rate per hour and the all-in rate measured against the city's minimum average hourly wage. The project total sits on the first row. The table sorts and filters by project or by DocuSign status, so the firm's position is on one screen.
The site KPI dashboard, redrawn in Co-Wright Intelligence: every subcontractor's hours, wages, wage rate, benefit rate and all-in rate for one project, with the project total on the first row.
Hours, pay and benefits, week by week
The third dashboard, the benefits calculator, is the detail behind the rate: the pay and hours that feed each subcontractor's benefit rate. It shows gross pay and hours by week, regular hours against overtime, hours by worker, and the timesheet behind any week, filtered to one subcontractor or one individual on the project. It is where a reviewer goes when a subcontractor's all-in rate needs a second look, and it is the level of detail independent auditors ask for.
The benefits calculator, redrawn in Co-Wright Intelligence: pay and hours by week, regular hours against overtime, hours by worker, and the timesheet rows beneath.
Command and control over every document
Two Trees runs the process rather than chasing it. Every certified payroll report and sign-in log since 2024 is in one place, read, reviewed and kept as evidence: more than 10,000 certified payroll reports and more than 15,000 daily sign-in logs at the last count. When independent auditors ask, the answer comes from the same portal.
SEAD automated our 421-a compliance documentation at Two Trees transforming a complex, manual process into a unified, real-time reporting system. By consolidating Certified Payroll Reports and Daily Sign-In Logs across subcontractors into a Single Portal of Truth, SEAD ensures accuracy, consistency, and full regulatory alignment. Their AI-powered data extraction and automated dashboards give us clarity into subcontractor performance, cost impact, and compliance status, helping us operate faster, reduce administrative burden, and confidently meet requirements.
If the obligation lives in documents nobody's system owns
At Two Trees, every certified payroll report and sign-in log becomes part of one reviewed, auditable record. The preview of your portal is built and shown by engineers, not a sales script.
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