Why Vangst trusts Greenshades for reliable, compliant payroll

Industry: Cannabis, agriculture, and light industrial staffing

Employees paid: ~1,000 across 24 states

Greenshades solutions: Payroll, HR, Tax, Green Employee

Vangst is a staffing and recruiting platform built for the cannabis industry, pairing employers with vetted, W-2 workers across manufacturing, agriculture, and industrial roles. Hiring and staffing needs among their clients vary widely by season, region, and role, and each combination carries its own pay and tax requirements.

Cannabis banking restrictions, high-volume staffing, and state-specific deadlines rule out most payroll vendors before the conversation even starts. Vangst needed a payroll partner built for that unique complexity, not around it.

Vangst is known for moving fast in an industry that most staffing platforms avoid. Three elements made it critical to find the right payroll fit:

• Banking. Most providers won't touch cannabis-adjacent payments. Vangst runs payroll through its own account with Brex and Valley Bank, which narrowed the field before price ever came up.
• Compliance speed. Vangst serves as a farm labor contractor for a California-based client, where wages have to be paid out the same day a pay period ends. Missing that window risks compliance penalties, and a workforce that isn't paid on time doesn't show up for the next shift.
• Scale. Paying roughly 1,000 people across 24 states means small errors compound fast without real guardrails.

Vangst had already felt these constraints under its previous provider, an embedded payroll and workforce payments platform, which offered limited visibility into payroll data and little control over its own employee portal. While Vangst evaluated multiple payroll providers, Greenshades stood out for its pricing model, its ability to scale alongside Vangst's growth, and the team's responsiveness and expertise.

To avoid disrupting operations, Vangst needed to go live with a new payroll solution within 45 days, no exceptions. With guidance from Greenshades' implementation team, Vangst met that deadline early, going live a week ahead of schedule with minimal complications along the way. A tight partnership between Vangst and its Greenshades point of contact throughout onboarding, who managed the rollout checklist, kept Vangst on track with steady, hands-on communication.

With Greenshades Payroll, Vangst now runs a structured, guardrail-driven payroll process while keeping full self-service access to its own data, providing flexibility without sacrificing control. That setup means Vangst only pays for what it needs and keeps full control of its own treasury and timing. As Jordan Wallace, Chief Operating Officer at Vangst, explains, “we also have so much more autonomy over how we approach and process payroll every week. Because we leverage Greenshades, we can set our own deadlines, manage our treasury function more efficiently, and automate a lot of the workflows we need in real time instead of being locked in a fixed process with an alternate provider.”

That same self-service extends to reporting. Instead of requesting custom reports from a vendor's team, Vangst pulls what it needs directly, which has sped up its monthly close process, and employees get accurate pay history on demand instead of waiting on a request. "With Greenshades, we're able to actually audit what we've paid and get accurate pay history details to our employees," says Nick. "That's been night and day."

Vangst also decides exactly when money moves. It pays through its own bank instead of waiting on a vendor's impound cycle, which is what makes same-day pay possible in California.

The result is a payroll process Vangst fully controls: accurate by default, auditable at every step, and run on Vangst's own clock, not a vendor's.

Since implementing Greenshades, Vangst has seen measurable gains across cost, compliance, and day-to-day operations:

• $100K+ saved annually compared to alternative payroll providers evaluated, without sacrificing flexibility or scalability as Vangst grows.
• Compliance issues down to near-zero, compared to frequent late payments and penalties from its previous solution.
• More working capital every week as payroll funds move 2 days later, so Vangst has extra days of cash on hand to manage on its own terms, not a vendor's.
• Clearer audits and increased accuracy in employee pay history, leading to operating efficiencies.

For a business where missing a single payroll run could mean 1,000 workers not showing up the next day, Vangst needed more than software. It needed certainty. Since making the move, that's what it's gotten: clean, accurate payroll it can run on its own terms, in an industry where most vendors can't keep up.