Articles

It's 23 December. Your out-of-office is on. Your laptop is, technically, closed. Then it arrives. "Sorry, quick one." The laptop is open again before you've popped your first bonbon. Every payroll manager in the country has a greatest-hits collection of things said to...

Something in your payroll hasn't been sitting right. Maybe a manager escalated a single pay anomaly. Maybe it's three or four underpayments over eighteen months that you've started to suspect aren't one-offs. Or maybe there's nothing you can point to at all, just the...

The complete guide to payroll audits for Australian enterprises A payroll audit is a systematic review of your payroll processes to identify underpayments, overpayments and compliance gaps before regulators do. From January 2025, the stakes changed dramatically....

Woolworths discovered payroll errors in 2019 that eventually cost the company $750 million. NAB announced a $130 million remediation programme in 2025, its second major payroll failure in five years. The University of Melbourne repaid $22 million to 15,000 employees...

The SCHADS Award covers workers across social services, community care, disability support, aged care and crisis accommodation. Getting payroll right means managing multiple classification levels, pay points, penalty rates and allowances across different employment...

A regional payroll manager stared at the payroll workbooks her implementation partner just delivered. Hundreds of pages of documentation.  Her head office expected her to sign off on these specifications so the build phase could begin. The project timeline...

Here's a story you've probably heard before: a US multinational with Australian operations needs a payroll system. The head office thinks, "We've got a great systems integrator handling our massive US implementation. They know our business, they know our systems. Why...

Most of my LinkedIn posts get 10-20 comments. But this post drew +120 and counting… So I figured a deeper dive may be of interest. I broke down the process we follow to eliminate pay rule ambiguity, so you never have to worry about inconsistent interpretations ever...

Why pay rule ambiguity is the hidden threat to AI success AI is rapidly transforming the conversation in HR and payroll. From intelligent automation to real-time employee support, the technology promises faster processing, fewer errors and smarter decision-making. In...

Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of conversations about AI and payroll. Some hopeful. Some sceptical. Some just confused. But nearly all of them orbit the same question: If AI can interpret the rules, answer pay queries and flag compliance risks faster than we can,...

You’ve seen it before. A payroll transformation project kicks off with energy. Teams are aligned, tasks are assigned, work begins. Then something happens. A key decision is delayed. A requirement is missing. A dependency isn’t resolved. The task gets parked “just for...