A short pitch on field operations, wages, and audits. Ten slides, five minutes.
Prepared for estate leadership · 2026
Where your money is counted
Attendance. Plucking weights. Advances, leave, deductions. On most estates every one of these is written into a book by hand, and a clerk computes the wage bill from it. Not in 1995. Now.
A November 2025 estate vacancy notice still hires for "handling and computing divisional checkrolls, books and documents." (Tea Research Institute, St Joachim Estate.)
What changed
The daily wage rose 70% by law in May 2024, from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,700. The Planters' Association puts the added cost at Rs 35 billion a year across the sector, with cost per kilo up about 45%.
Every counting error in the book now costs 70% more than it used to. Ghost workers, name-boarding, a wrong column: all of it, at the new rate.
The trap
The Planters' Association itself says productivity-linked wages are the only way forward. That model needs per-worker output, captured daily, on every division. A book cannot do it. The estates that can measure will set the terms.
The other clock
Eighteen of twenty plantation groups hold Rainforest Alliance certification, and the evidence lives in files spread across divisions. The sector also remembers the exposé on certified estates: undocumented wage deductions, investigations, buyers asking questions.
Clean, digital wage records are the defence. Not a folder hunt the week the auditor lands.
What B3 builds
Attendance and field weights recorded on a phone at the muster ground. Works with no signal; syncs when it reaches the office.
The checkroll computed automatically: rates, advances, deductions, EPF and ETF. With 50 or more employees, electronic EPF returns are already the law. The book cannot file them. This can.
Every record stamped, stored, and exportable. When the auditor asks, the answer is minutes, not a week of folders.
Built for the field
Fully offline in the field. Sinhala and Tamil. Large text, few buttons, built beside your clerks and kanganis, not against them. The morning routine stays exactly the same. The only thing that disappears is the book.
Why this is not an ERP pitch
Whatever system head office runs, or buys next, wages still begin in a field book at 6 a.m. We are the field layer: the accurate muster and wage data that feeds your office systems instead of fighting them. Priced per estate. Live in weeks, not years.
The offer
The ask
One call to choose the pilot division. One visit to set up. Thirty days to the numbers. B3 is Methika and Thanuka: small, fast, Sri Lankan, and building this with the people who run the field.