Farmers stung by MBIE investigation

A recent Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) investigation has exposed a myriad of payroll issues in the dairy industry. As well as serious breaches of employment law like unpaid wages or below minimum wages, there were a host of other issues that could so easily be avoided, such as poor recordkeeping or ignorance of the law.

In this day and age there’s no reason why this should be happening. With a proliferation of online payroll software solutions on the market, payroll compliance should be simple. FlexiTime takes things a step further as our software was specifically developed for businesses with part time or casual employees. Our Shift plan includes rosters and an iPad photo time clock for recording exact clock in and out times. Time entries from the time clock are sent straight through to FlexiTime for payroll processing in just a few clicks.

We have farming customers who keep an iPad down at the milking shed so staff can clock in and out of their shifts. Our Shift iPad app works offline as well, which is ideal on a farm. All they need to do is take it back to the house every few days or at the end of the week, connect it to the internet and all of the time entries that have been saved on the iPad transfer through to FlexiTime, ready for payroll.

With the irregular and often long hours worked by agriculture staff, it can easily go unnoticed that their effective pay rate (earnings divided by hours) has slipped below the minimum wage. If you’re recording hours worked with our time clock you can easily review the effective pay rates in our report centre before running a pay and make any necessary adjustments.

A small investment in some good quality payroll software will save you a lot of time and hassle, and help you avoid any potential penalties from the Employment Relations Authority.