Food production is hard work. Countless laborers work the fields, tend to the livestock, and toil in food processing plants to feed the hungry masses. It’s difficult to manage a sizable workforce. Fortunately, there are some quality payroll processing services that make the task a little easier.

Here are five reasons why we encourage clients to use a payroll processing service:

  1. Payroll services know what they’re doing, they’re set up to do it efficiently, and their fees are reasonable — the cost of missing one federal tax deposit can amount to a full year of payroll service fees!
  2. Payroll service providers generate reports to help you comply with the labor laws in each state – including overtime provisions. It’s much easier to get it right the first time than to experience costly (and unpleasant) wage audits and lawsuits.
  3. Many payroll service providers can connect your time clocks to their system to capture when your employees punch in and out of work. You save the hassle of collecting time cards, adding hours, and submitting them to your service provider.
  4. They’ll handle employee questions and concerns. Your interactions with employees can focus on business requirements and job performance.
  5. They’ll provide useful reports to help you manage your business. Detailed information on labor costs is crucial for business planning.

Where possible, we recommend a bimonthly versus biweekly payroll. Why? The biweekly option creates two months in which you have three payrolls, which makes it more difficult to manage cash flow and generate appropriate financial reports to honor your bank covenants.

Agribusiness often presents many challenges and complexity. Payroll doesn’t have to be one of them.