Late April, 5:15 in the afternoon. Mike is in the parking lot of his shop in the Eastern Townships, engine still running. He just got three emails in ten minutes. The seniors' residence in Granby. The commercial renovation in Bromont. The school addition that got pushed from last fall.

He pulls a scrap of packing tape from the glovebox — the only blank surface within reach — and writes six names on it. The workers he wants to call back. He has two weeks before the first Monday.

It's not the calls he's dreading. It's everything that comes after.

A callback is more than a phone call

Bringing someone back after a winter layoff isn't the same as adding a shift. You need to confirm their availability — but also check that their competency certificate is still valid, update their payroll information if anything changed over the winter, and make sure the right wage rates apply from hour one.

CCQ wage rates change in late April. If you call someone back on May 1st and discover in June that the wrong rate has been running since the beginning, fixing it takes time, paperwork, and explanations. It's avoidable. But only if you catch it at the start, not after three pay periods.

And it's not just rates. It's the accumulation of small things: a new bank account they forgot to mention, an address that changed, a tax form that hasn't been updated since last year's situation. Each one is a five-minute fix when you catch it on day one. Collectively, on a week when you're bringing back five people, they add up fast — and they tend to surface at the worst time, which is 48 hours after the first paycheque goes out.

Who goes first, and why it matters

You rarely have the luxury of calling everyone back the same Monday. Even if you did, it probably wouldn't go well.

A structured callback looks something like this:

Foremen first. They need to be on site before their crews — to read the plans, identify problems, understand the sequence before anyone shows up with tools.

Key tradespeople for the first week, based on what actually needs to happen in days 1 through 5. That depends on the project type: a commercial fit-out starts differently from a structural addition.

Apprentices and newer workers once the base teams are in place and there's someone to supervise them properly.

Write this down somewhere other than your head. Not because you'll forget — you've worked with these people for years. But when two projects are moving at once and you're deciding who goes where, you need a list. Not a conversation you're trying to reconstruct from a parking lot at 7 AM.

The paperwork that falls through in the rush

Three documents that consistently get missed when callbacks arrive all at once:

Tax forms. Federal TD1, provincial TP-1015.3-V. If someone's situation changed since last year — a child in shared custody, a second income, a new dependent — their withholding can be wrong from the first paycheque. Three minutes per person at callback time prevents a correction three weeks later.

Bank details. Accounts change over the winter. People forget to mention it. A returned deposit means a frustrated call the day after payday from someone who was counting on that money.

Occupation classification. If a worker earned a higher apprenticeship level over the winter, or a journeyman changed trade, that needs to be updated before the first billable hour — not after. Recoding entries that have already been submitted takes longer than doing it right at the start.

Hours tracking starts on day one, not at the first paycheque

This is where most problems actually get created. A worker comes back April 28th. The first timesheets arrive at the end of the week, or the end of the fortnight depending on your pay cycle. In between, the sites shift, premiums apply — or get missed — and a few public holidays disappear into the pile.

If you wait until the first pay period to validate everything, you're reconstructing two weeks from memory. That's when travel premiums fall off. That's when Easter Monday vanishes. That's when someone ends up coded at the wrong apprenticeship level for a full pay period.

The fix is straightforward: hours entry starts on the first day of work. Not the first Friday. Not when you have a minute. Day one.

With a mobile tool like Heuro, workers clock in from their phones directly on site. Your office manager sees the data in real time, reviews exceptions, and the first paycheque is clean — even with six callbacks running in parallel.

When two projects start the same week

Mike's situation — three projects, two weeks — isn't unusual. Summer in Quebec is often exactly this. And the hard part isn't finding the people. It's knowing who's where, how many hours they've put in on which site, and whether your labour costs are tracking against what you quoted.

If every hour is tagged to a site the moment it's entered, that sorting happens by itself. If you're working from generic timesheets that you redistribute later, you end up spending time on a reconciliation that shouldn't need to happen — and you risk misattributing costs to the wrong job. In the middle of a busy spring, that's how you get to October thinking a project went well and realizing it didn't.

Site-by-site tracking in the spring also gives you early warning when a project is burning through hours faster than planned, before it becomes a problem at closeout. We've covered that in more detail in the post on labour cost tracking by site.

If you want to see what a clean ramp-up looks like in practice, the 18-employee contractor in Montérégie in our case study ran a similar spring restart — and has had zero post-submission corrections since.

Take 20 minutes with us if you want to see what that would look like for your team.

Key takeaways

A spring callback is a fast-track onboarding: same steps as a new hire, multiplied across several people at once
Sequence your callbacks: foremen first, key tradespeople next, apprentices once base teams are stable
Validate tax forms, bank details, and occupation classifications before the first billable hour
Hours tracking starts on day one of work — not at the first paycheque
Tag every hour to a site at entry: that's the foundation of accurate cost tracking and clean payroll