Overtime Tracking Through 2nd Sight
With legislation passing new overtime restrictions it is of the upmost importance to find the essential tools and techniques to best adapt to the new changes regarding the hour thresholds of your employees. Luckily our crew at 2nd Sight has developed an overtime hour tracking report that helps track those pesky hours and notify administration when certain employees are approaching their hour threshold for the week. In addition to the hour tracking, we are also working diligently to help implement an estimated pay report for the excess hours that would fall into the overtime category. We know the importance of separating the additional overtime hours from the standard hours but calculating the exact pay for those overtime hours has been a little bit tricky for our team, but we are getting close to developing something that we have confidence in calculating the overtime pay.
Unprecedented Inflation
As most of you are aware, we are currently in a time of extreme inflation, which has been skyrocketing the prices of some of the most essential needs for business such as parts, gasoline, fertilizer, and many other everyday items. We understand the difficulty of these current times and are here for your support. The prices of agricultural chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides have skyrocketed over 50% this year alone, which is extremely worrisome when fertilizers and chemicals represent anywhere between 10-20% of total costs for U.S. farmers. If that wasn’t enough the price of prepared animal feed has also gone up 12.7% this year, which hammers the livestock sector as well. Only a mere two years ago the nation’s average diesel price per gallon was only $2.39, and now we are looking at numbers that have inflated by just over 123% resulting in an average price per gallon of $5.12. Obviously with these astronomical increases of costs it has made the cost of farming increase by nearly 50% over the past two years alone. We understand the difficulty these current times create and are here to support you. 2nd Sight can help save you money in another area of rising costs such as labor. Our labor tracking software such as FairTrak and MobileClock can both help streamline and reduce labor costs and payroll, while organizing your business tasks automatically.
Late Freezes and Historically Cold Weather
In a year of extreme changes many of us have also had the short end of the stick regarding the weather within our respective regions. As many of you know we are a Spokane, Washington based company and today we broke a 126-year-old weather record. It is almost June, and we still have not reached 70 degrees one single time this year breaking the record stemming from 1896. In addition to that the state of Washington also got hit with several late freezes that hurt many early crops such as cherries. Several friends of ours up the Abbotsford/Vancouver area of BC had their crops face a similar fate due to the wave of late freezing during early harvest. Not only did this historically late freeze hurt our NW customer’s crops, but only months before many of our beloved southern customers down in Georgia, North Carolina, and even parts of Florida also got hit with an aggressive week of freezing that led to tremendous crop loss, primarily in their blueberries. It seems to be one of those years where there is no easy sailing, and I commend all of you who have battled through these recent hardships and have continued working hard and moving forward, and you will continue to have our gratitude and support every step of the way.