Brewery payroll: production crews, taproom tips, and packaging season

Two workforces, one business number

The brewhouse and the taproom keep different hours, different pay patterns, and different accounting destinations, so the payroll file should know which side every person works. Brewers and cellar hands run salaried or full-time hourly with early brew-day starts, and their wages belong in the cost of the beer — without that split, gross margin per hectolitre is fiction. Taproom staff are part-time, evening-and-weekend, tipped, and sit in operating costs like any hospitality team. We give each side its own wage codes so every pay run posts to the right place automatically, and we track hours on both: a cellar hand who covers a packaging run on top of full weeks crosses Ontario's 44-hour overtime line on total hours, whatever the job titles say.

Tips at the taps: control decides the treatment

Taprooms are card-first, so tips arrive in the brewery's account and someone has to move them — and how they move sets the CRA answer. Many breweries pool taproom tips across everyone on shift, and some share a cut with the brewhouse. The moment the brewery sets that formula and distributes the money, the tips are controlled: they run through payroll with CPP, EI, and tax withheld, and they land on T4s. If instead the servers set their own split and the brewery merely passes card tips through promptly, they remain direct — no source deductions, reported by each employee. Neither choice is wrong; a cross-team pool that includes brewers can only exist as a controlled pool, so accept the payroll cost as the price of that culture. Ontario adds one warning shot: owners share in a tip pool only while regularly doing the same work to a substantial degree — pouring on Friday nights counts, signing cheques does not. Decide the policy once, in writing, and never change it mid-year without re-papering it.

Packaging season: crews that appear and disappear

Canning and bottling runs concentrate labour into short bursts, and the temptation is to treat run-day helpers as something less than employees. They are not: hired line workers on your schedule, using your equipment, are on payroll from the first shift — digital TD1 before they touch a rinser, WSIB coverage in place, vacation pay added to each cheque, and an ROE with code A filed through ROE Web when the run ends and their earnings stop for seven days. The legitimate alternative is the mobile canning company that rolls in with its own line, its own crew, and an invoice; that is a supplier relationship, and their people never touch your payroll. What does not work is the hybrid — their name on an invoice, your control over the people — because a CPP/EI ruling looks at the working reality, not the paperwork.

The calendar: remittances next to excise

A licensed producer already lives on a monthly compliance clock, and payroll adds a second hand to it: source-deduction remittances by the 15th of the following month, sitting alongside the monthly excise duty return that comes with the licence. Both are trust-style obligations that CRA pursues aggressively, so we build one cash calendar covering both and fund it from the same weekly review. The rest of the spine is standard but worth stating: T4s by end of February, WSIB premiums reconciled annually across production and service classifications, and the Employer Health Tax only past $1 million of Ontario payroll — a threshold a growing brewery with a full taproom can actually reach. Keg deposits, excise, and margin per SKU live next door in our brewery bookkeeping; if you are exporting south or weighing US contract brewing, the TTB and tariff questions live in our cross-border guide for breweries.

Source: Ontario — Your guide to the ESA: Hours of work.