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Keeping Cannabis Payroll, HR, and Tax Operations Secure with Greenshades

Author:
Jerika Holton
|
May 23, 2023
|
5 min

Imagine suddenly being faced with the obstacle of figuring out how you will compensate employees for their hard work. This has become the reality for many Cannabis businesses. In 2023 Paychex has become the latest large-name provider to stop supporting direct deposit and tax payment services to cannabis companies beginning May 1st of 2023.

Unfortunately, it's not the first time that such a situation has occurred, leaving the cannabis industry in a difficult position. The limited notice about the termination of service has left many scrambling to find alternative payroll providers who can support the special regulatory and compliance needs of the cannabis industry.

What This Means for You

Despite the setbacks, the cannabis industry is expected to continue growing. In fact, according to MJ Biz Daily, U.S. medical and recreational cannabis sales could reach $33.6 billion by the end of 2023. With sales on the rise, and more employment opportunities opening, processing payroll by hand can become increasingly difficult and time-consuming. It's essential for cannabis businesses to have a payroll plan in place for unexpected disruptions, including finding reliable payroll providers that are willing to work with the industry's distinct requirements.

Consider an in-house provider to support payroll, HR, and tax operations. In-house payroll processing gives you the ability to maintain control over your payroll operations, including the timing of your finances. When circumstances such as the Silicon Valley Bank failure arise, you are prepared.  

By managing your payroll internally, you'll:  

  • Ensure that your payroll matters are customized to your business preferences
  • Maintain control over employee information
  • Have complete control over finances  

How Greenshades Can Support Your Cannabis Business

With Greenshades, you have an in-house payroll, HR, and tax partner that will support the unique obligations of the cannabis industry while allowing you to keep control of your operations, cash flow, and important data.  

Payroll

With Greenshades, you can customize your payroll process to suit the specific needs of your business. With an intuitive workflow, you can seamlessly run payroll from start to finish, allowing you to pay employees via check or direct deposit with ease. Complex payroll calculations handled for you, and through the process you automatically adhere to location-specific labor laws, ensuring compliance with tax withholding, overtime laws, and other regulations.  

For your reporting needs, Greenshades Payroll Custom Fields allows you to define labor for cost accounting purposes. Easily support multi-state workforces, ensuring compliance with relevant labor laws. With Greenshades, you can keep control of your finances and cash flow, there's no need to pre-fund a payroll tax account. Instead, you retain control of your funds and receive alerts when payments are due.

Tax and Compliance

Greenshades software is built to uphold compliance for payroll, unlimited garnishments, ACA provisions, and more. Support employees working across various jurisdictions with the proper local, state, and federal payroll tax withholdings.  

When it comes time for year-end, collect and validate data, create forms, verify SSNs, and review all your forms in one simple workflow. Inside the payroll tax software, process annual and quarterly federal and state unemployment forms, and new hire reporting.

Time and Labor Management

Our timesheets are built to support the unpredictable shifts that arise in the cannabis industry. Easily track shift differentials, overtime, location-specific overtime, break rules, shifts crossing midnight, holidays worked, and much more. Lathem, our timeclocks partner, offers a variety of physical time clocks or allow employees to clock in using a desktop or mobile device. Managers can easily review and approve timesheets before sending the information to the payroll software.  

Human Resources

With Greenshades, manage the entire employee life cycle. Manage onboarding, benefits administration, certification and license tracking, and HR documents all in one location to ensure employees are supported from day one. Through our marketplace partner JazzHR, you can recruit top talent to keep your organization staffed to meet the growing industry demands. Stay connected with employees through the self-service portal.  

The employee-driven portal gives employees access right at their fingertips. A few functions employees can access include:

  • Requesting time off
  • Managing benefits
  • Accessing important documentation such as paystubs, tax forms, and HR documents
  • Reviewing timesheets

So, no matter if employees are working in the dispensary, cultivation, or other deskless positions, employees stay connected.

As an in-house solution, you keep control over your employee data. With an outsourced provider, you must share employee data and increase the risk of data breaches seen with provider UKG. PFChang's restaurant chain was storing their employee information inside the UltiPro system (now known as UKG Pro). When switching providers, UKG permanently deleted all employee data and as a result, PF Chang's had to start fresh and rebuild their historical company data.

Benefits Management

Take the hassle out of open enrollment for your employees with Benefits Management software. Benefits are critical to the compensation package. By providing clear insights into eligible plans, employees can make confident decisions when self-enrolling. Moreover, our software automatically notifies employees when it's time to adjust or re-enroll in benefits, simplifying the process of reporting key life events or re-enrolling via the self-service portal.

Is Greenshades Right for Your Cannabis Operations?

As the cannabis industry continues to grow, new payroll and HR challenges continue to arise. Compliance remains at the top of the list, along with recruiting and retaining talent, IRS Tax Code 280e, finding suitable banking partners, and now, the potential of being dropped by an HCM provider.

The cannabis industry is faced with unique challenges and uncertainty, and through it all, choose a partner that will not leave you during critical times. Learn more about how Greenshades can support your organization contact us at sales@greenshades.com to set up a demo.

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