When your day is busy from sun-up to sun-down, down you don’t have a lot of time to think about new tools or tech, you just get things done.  It's important to "not let perfect be in the way of good enough", but it's also important that "good enough" is the right tool for your farm.  Let's talk about picking tools that are that are built for your farm.

Generic payroll is painful

“It isn’t great, but it’s the only thing available in my budget” is how tens of thousands of farms ended up using QuickBooks Payroll.  For a while this made sense — it offered cheap licensing for QuickBooks Desktop and an affordable payroll service — but the pain was real:

• Manually enter time because there is no app that works in your fields
• Use external timesheets like T-sheets (that Intuit acquired and discontinued?)
• Manually edit payroll checks because there is no easy way to record multiple pay rates
• Invent clumsy class code systems to try and get field-level reporting
• Process corrections each tax period to fix small errors in your payments

That pain got a lot harder to swallow when flat-rate pricing was discontinued in favor of expensive subscriptions.  It's even more painful if you think about how frequently that price is going to get raised in the future.

What is a small farm to do?

 FieldClock Payroll - our love letter to small farms

We’ve known the pain that small farms go through with QuickBooks -- some of our earliest customers were QuickBooks users.  We first tried to kill that pain by integrating our labor platform with QuickBooks, but there were still limitations in their software. Our next move was to advocate for farmers and reach out to Intuit directly with feature requests that would make life better for farmers. I'll paraphrase how we interpreted their response: "we don't care about farmers".

In 2023 we decided to take matters into our own hands. With the help of ADP® (who pays 1 in 6 people in America!), we built FieldClock Payroll Powered by ADP®. This allows us to offer a farm-focused payroll service that seamlessly integrates with our industry-leading labor tracking platform. The best part? We’re able to offer this at a lower price than QuickBooks Payroll and, if you join our loyalty program,  we'll even lock that low price for 3 years so you don’t have to worry about it going up each year.

Think about it:

• Farm-focused
• Powered by ADP®, not some startup
• Paycard integration available
• More affordable than QuickBooks Payroll
• Price-lock available (and you even get a discount!)
• Provided by a company that respects you and treats you fairly

(And don't worry about your accounting software, FieldClock Payroll integrates with QuickBooks and several other popular accounting systems so you can easily put that payroll data into your ledger.)

There’s more than payroll

Now, we’ve heard other companies pretend to be focused on small farms. “We have a paycard” doesn’t really have anything to do with small farms. “We are building a separate app” seems to indicate that the main app doesn’t work well. There are other indicators that companies aren’t really focused on small farmers:

• You have to call or book a meeting for their pricing
• They don’t provide easy access to phone support
• You have to buy their custom hardware
• They require a contract or NDA
• They don’t publish uptime

I’m proud that FieldClock has always taken the road less traveled. We go out of our way to be the kind of company that you want to do business with:

• Public pricing on our website
• U.S.-based phone support
• Available in App Store and Google Play
• No contract required
• Full transparency

The best part is that we know we’re on the right path because we watch other companies become more like us every year. FieldClock is leading the industry forward and we’re doing it in service of farmers everywhere.

Protect your family legacy

Each Census of Agriculture results in an older average age of farm operators. More and more farmers are at retirement age but succession planning and execution is hard! FieldClock is here to help you with that.

Think back to those “good enough” workflows that you’ve developed over the years and what would happen if you tried to hand them off to the next generation. How detailed are your instructions for entering time, running payroll, paying and filing taxes? Writing documentation for all that is hard and it would be easy for things to grind to a halt if 1 step was missed or poorly detailed. Wouldn’t you rather just invite your successor to your account and be done with it?

With FieldClock, you can do that. They’ll have access to your data as well as our online help center and top-notch, U.S.-based support team. You don’t have to worry about whether or not they find the right password on a Post-it stuck to that old computer in your office.  Whether you're handing off the reins, or just taking a break, it's easier to do if you have the right tooling in place.

In addition to protecting your day-to-day operations, FieldClock also protects your data by providing small farms with the same robust disaster recovery system required by large enterprise farms.  If you've ever had a barn or shop burn down and you had any records in there, you understand how important it is to have digital backups.  And it's even better if those backups are managed on world-class infrastructure so you don't have to think about them!

Whew! That was a bit more than I planned on writing, but I get excited when talking about our platform. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that small farms can leverage the power that is usually only available to larger farms with big budgets and I want the world to know.  

-josh