How To Keep Records

Introduction

Nobody keeps records for the pleasure of it. You keep them for the day somebody asks.

You do not need a lawyer on retainer, a compliance officer or a folder with a lock on it. You need to know which award covers your crew, what to write down, and where the writing is kept.

This chapter is about turning a season into a file.

The records exist. They sit in a payroll system, a supervisor’s notebook, a shoebox of signed forms and a spreadsheet somebody built in 2019 — four places, none of which agree about how many hours Ana worked in the second week of September. That is not a record. It is four drafts of one.

The cost shows up late and all at once. A picker who left in October rings the Fair Work Ombudsman in March. A backpacker asks you to confirm the days they worked eighteen months ago, and you have to tell them you are not sure.

What follows names the things a farm is asked to write down, in the order you meet them. This is not legal advice — check it against the award and your own adviser.

A record does its work in three moments:

• The pay run. Hours, rates and piece counts are settled before the money moves, not reconstructed after it.
• The question. A worker, a former worker or an inspector asks about one person on one date.
• The claim. If an underpayment is alleged and you cannot produce the records, the argument starts with you on the back foot.

Which Award Covers Your Crew

Two farms in the same district, picking the same fruit, can sit under different awards. Yours is decided by the work, not by the district.

For most farm crews in Australia that is the Horticulture Award MA000028. It covers growing, harvesting, packing and treating horticultural crops, and it is the instrument behind the classification levels, the casual loading and the piecework rules further down.

It is not the only one. Livestock and broadacre work commonly sits under the Pastoral Award MA000035; wine grapes raise a Wine Industry question rather than a horticulture one; nurseries, cane, cotton and forestry each have coverage of their own. Plenty of farms do two of those at once, and the boundary runs through the work, not around the front gate.

Stop and check coverage when any of these is true:

• You grow wine grapes. Table grapes and wine grapes are picked much the same way and are not covered the same way.
• You run stock as well as crop. The stockman and the picker may not sit under one award.
• You have a nursery, cane, cotton or a plantation. Each carries its own coverage, and a mixed operation can sit across two.
• You pack for other growers. A shed taking third-party fruit is a different question from a shed packing your own.

Where it is unclear, do not guess, and do not let a guess harden into a habit. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes coverage guidance for every award, and half an hour with an employer adviser costs less than a season paid under the wrong one. Write down the award you settled on, the date and who decided — that note is the first record in the file.

Where the software helps, and where it stops:

Classify Everyone Once

Every person you pay carries three facts, and all three need settling before their first shift.

The first is employment type: casual, part-time or full-time. The second is the classification level under the award, which in horticulture runs from level 1 to level 5. The third is the rate, and it has to sit at or above the award minimum for that type and level. Settle the three once and every pay run afterwards is arithmetic. Get one wrong and it stays wrong on every payslip until somebody notices.

Employment type is the one treated as a formality, and it is not one. A casual is paid a 25% loading in place of leave and can be engaged shift by shift. A part-timer has agreed regular hours and accrues leave. The loading is not a discount you apply to a permanent, and writing “casual” beside someone who works a fixed roster all year does not make them one.

Weekend work is where the folklore is worst. Under the Horticulture Award a casual working ordinary hours on a Sunday is paid ordinary rates — there is no separate casual Sunday penalty. Overtime starts only once that casual passes the award’s daily threshold, or its averaged one over the weeks that follow. The higher Sunday and harvest-Sunday rates people repeat at the pub belong to full-time and part-time employees, not to casuals. There is no Saturday penalty in this award for anybody.

Three facts, and what each one changes:

Write the three down against the person with the date they took effect. When a rate changes, a new dated record beats an edited old one every time. The question that arrives later is never “what do you pay them” — it is “what were you paying them in September”.

The Records the Law Asks For

Five things make up the spine of the file, and a farm that can produce all five for any worker on any date can answer almost every question it will be asked.

Employee records are kept for seven years. Not the year you are in, not until the worker leaves — seven years from the record itself.

The regulations name more categories than five — termination, flexibility arrangements, transfer of business — but each one hangs off the spine above, so a farm holding those five has somewhere to put the rest.

Hours

When each person started, when they finished, and the unpaid breaks in between. For casuals and part-timers this is the record of hours actually worked. Overtime is recorded as overtime rather than folded into one daily total, because the number that matters a year later is the split.

Pay

The rate paid, the gross and net amounts, every deduction and what each deduction was for. A payslip has to reach the worker within one working day of payment, even if they are away, and a copy of what you issued belongs in the file.

Leave

Leave taken and the balance remaining, for anyone who accrues it. Casuals do not accrue annual leave — that is what the 25% loading stands in for — but a casual moving to permanent under the employee choice pathway, and unpaid leave, both leave a trail worth keeping.

Superannuation

The amounts contributed, the dates they were paid, the fund they went to and how each amount was worked out. Where the worker chose the fund, the record shows that they chose it.

Piecework

The written piecework record for every worker paid by output, plus the piece counts and the hours those counts were earned in. This is the one farms most often keep by halves, and it is the one worth taking apart.

None of the five is hard on its own. What makes a file hard is that the five usually live in different systems, and a record split four ways has four chances to disagree with itself.

Three rules sit over the whole file:

• Legible and in English. A tally scratched on a bin card in a shorthand only the leading hand reads is not a record.
• Never false or misleading. Correcting a genuine error is expected and fine. Tidying a week after the fact so it looks better is a separate and far more serious problem.
• Able to be produced. An employer who cannot produce records in an underpayment claim carries a reversed onus — the worker’s account of the hours is taken as correct unless the employer can show otherwise.

The last rule cuts both ways. The records are not only an obligation you carry; they are the evidence you get to rely on. A farm that has paid every worker correctly and kept nothing has no way to show it.

Piece Rates and the Floor

A piece rate is a way of paying, not a way around the hourly floor. Under the Horticulture Award both numbers exist on the same day, and both belong in the record.

The written record comes first. Before a worker picks a single bin on piece rates there has to be a piecework record in writing, signed, naming the task, the unit, the rate per unit, the date it starts and the worker’s hourly rate. Signed afterwards is not signed. A handshake at the top of the row is not a record.

A piecework record works only if all four are true:

1. 1In writing. Not a run of text messages, not a line on the whiteboard.
2. 2Signed by both. The farm and the worker, each holding a copy.
3. 3Before the work. Dated and in place before the first day it applies to.
4. 4Specific. One task, one unit, one rate — a record covering “picking” in general covers nothing in particular.

Then there is the rate itself. The award requires a piece rate to be set so an average competent worker earns at least 15% above the relevant minimum hourly rate for that work. That is a judgement about the crop, the block and the day: a rate that clears the test on a heavy first pick can fail it on a thin third pass, and no software can measure your crew’s productivity on your behalf.

Since 2022 a second floor sits underneath the first. A pieceworker has to receive at least the minimum hourly rate for their classification, multiplied by the hours they actually worked, checked day by day. Where the piece earnings come to more, the worker keeps the higher amount. Where they come to less, the difference is a top-up the farm pays.

Two numbers decide a piecework day:

So both sides go in the record: the hours and the piece counts, for every piecework day, against the named task they were earned on. A farm that records only the tally can pay every worker correctly all season and still be unable to demonstrate it — which, under a reversed onus, sits uncomfortably close to not having paid correctly at all.

Piece-rate setting is where careful farms most often come unstuck, because it is the one number that needs a view on how fast an average competent person can work your crop. This is not legal advice — check it against the award and your own adviser, before you set a rate and again when the block or the crop changes.

Visas and the 88 Days

Some of the people picking your fruit are counting days, and the evidence they need comes from you.

A Working Holiday Maker on subclass 417 or 462 can apply to extend their stay by completing a period of specified work — the 88 days, as everyone on the farm calls it. Whether a particular worker qualifies turns on their visa, their passport and where and when the work was done, and those rules move. Home Affairs is the source for that, not the crew.

What the farm owns is the evidence. The worker has to be able to show who employed them, where, when and doing what — and every one of those facts is already in your records if the file is in the shape above.

The evidence a worker needs names five things:

• Who employed them. The legal entity’s name and its ABN — the business on the agreement, not the name painted on the ute.
• When. The dates actually worked, day by day, not a rounded “about three months”.
• Where. The location and postcode of the work, because eligibility turns on the region.
• What. The type of work — planting, harvesting, pruning, packing — in plain words.
• How much. Hours or days, matching the time records the same person appears in.

The form itself is the part your own records do not cover. Sign off the days that were worked, and only those. A backpacker four days short at the end of a season is an uncomfortable conversation, and the pressure is real — but the form goes to the Commonwealth over your name, about somebody you have known six weeks. Have the conversation anyway.

What makes this easy in March is what you did in September:

When Someone Asks to See It

A request for records arrives as an email with a name and a date range in it.

It rarely comes from where you expect. A worker who left two seasons ago wants their payslips. A supermarket’s sourcing auditor wants agreements for everyone in the shed on a named Tuesday. A migration agent wants dates for one backpacker.

Every one is the same request in a different coat: show me what happened, for this person, between these dates. A farm that answers in an afternoon is in a different position from one that needs a fortnight and a shed clean-out, and the difference was decided months earlier by where the records were put.

Before the season starts, check three things:

• One place, not four. If hours, agreements and piece counts live in separate systems, somebody has to reconcile them under pressure.
• Someone other than you can find it. A record only the owner can retrieve fails in the week the owner is in hospital.
• It comes out in a form a stranger can read. A file you cannot export is a file you will retype.

Keep the file for the full seven years, including for people who have left. The seven years runs from the record, not from the employment. Someone who finished in 2021 is still in the file in 2028. Sensitive details earn narrower handling inside it — a tax file number is collected to pass through to payroll and kept encrypted, and once you have moved it into payroll you can destroy it from the record and have that destruction logged.

Where a system earns its keep is retrieval:

What comes next:

This is the last chapter, so what comes next is the work. Go back to Chapter I and start on the ground: lot and plan numbers into a property record, blocks split and named before the crew arrives. Every hour, rate and signature in this chapter has to point at a block before it means anything.