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People Experience Solutions

Payroll assurance across the roster-to-pay chain.

PES reviews the rosters, time capture, award and enterprise agreement interpretation, data and controls that decide whether people are paid correctly, and shows where the evidence for a pay outcome breaks down.

Underpayment risk is rarely just a payroll problem

A pay result depends on decisions made well before the pay run: the position and classification, the roster, the time recorded, the leave taken, the allowance claimed, the rule that interpreted it and the approval that released it. If any of those is wrong, payroll calculates the wrong answer accurately.

In our reviews, we often find that the documented process is not the process used to complete payroll. Spreadsheets, local practices and manual adjustments carry part of the real process, and nobody can show how a particular pay result was produced.

Common signs

  • Ownership of rules and exceptions split between HR, payroll, operations and IT
  • Manual workarounds and local practices that sit outside the system
  • No traceable link from an award or enterprise agreement clause to its configuration
  • Little evidence that interpretation rules were tested against real work patterns
  • No way to reconcile time worked, time paid and the reason for the difference
  • Time and attendance and payroll systems without a shared audit trail

When organisations bring PES in

The trigger is usually a question about pay that the organisation cannot answer with evidence.

  • An underpayment has been found, or a regulator, union or auditor is asking how pay is calculated.
  • Award or enterprise agreement changes need to be configured and nobody can confirm the current rules are right.
  • A payroll, time and attendance or rostering replacement is planned and the current rules need to be understood before they are specified.
  • A new system has gone live and pay issues are continuing.
  • Leadership needs an independent view before committing to remediation or a broader system investment.

How the review works

The review follows the work from the roster to the payslip, across whichever systems, interfaces and spreadsheets carry it.

  1. Map the time-to-pay chain

    Trace how work becomes pay: rostering, time capture, approvals, interpretation, payroll calculation and the interfaces between them, including the manual steps.

  2. Test interpretation with worked examples

    Run real work patterns through the rules, such as a shift crossing midnight, a broken shift or a casual working across two cost centres, and compare the result with what the instrument requires.

  3. Assess controls and ownership

    Identify who owns each rule, exception and approval, where controls are missing or depend on one person, and where the system and the documented process disagree.

  4. Rank the findings

    Separate confirmed errors, control weaknesses and open questions in a risk-ranked report, so leadership can decide what to fix first.

  5. Set the next step

    Recommend whether remediation, a configuration review, process redesign or a system change should come first, and what evidence each one needs.

Typical outputs

  • Time-to-pay process map
  • Payroll and time and attendance risk register
  • Award and enterprise agreement interpretation observations
  • Clause-to-configuration traceability approach
  • Worked-example decision log
  • Control weakness summary
  • Test scenarios for future rule changes
  • Executive findings and recommendations

Risks this work addresses

  • Underpayment found by employees, unions or the Fair Work Ombudsman before it is found internally
  • Remediation that corrects past pay but leaves the rule or process that caused the error
  • A replacement system configured from undocumented current rules, carrying the same errors forward
  • Pay outcomes that cannot be explained or evidenced when challenged
  • Interpretation knowledge held by one or two people in payroll or rostering

Evidence for each pay outcome matters more than the platform

Whatever the platform, the organisation needs to be able to explain, test and evidence how a pay outcome was produced, from the rostered shift through to the final payroll result. If it cannot do that today, a replacement project will face the same question during design and testing, with less time to answer it.

Project example

Client names, sectors, project values and specific outcomes are not disclosed.

Payroll and time-to-pay risk review

Payroll assuranceTime-to-payRisk review
Situation
An organisation with complex shift-based and casual workforces needed to understand whether the time-to-pay process, from roster and award interpretation through to payroll output, was accurate, auditable and defensible.
PES role
Reviewed the end-to-end time-to-pay process, assessed system controls and interpretation practices, identified risk areas and prepared a risk-ranked findings report for leadership.
Outputs
  • Time-to-pay process map
  • Risk and gap register
  • Award interpretation observations
  • Control weakness summary
  • Executive recommendations
Decision supported
Whether to prioritise payroll remediation, award configuration review or process redesign before committing to broader transformation investment.
All project examples

Common questions

Is a payroll assurance review the same as a payroll audit?

It covers some of the same ground but starts earlier in the chain. An audit typically samples pay results. This review traces how those results are produced, from roster and time capture through interpretation and approvals, so the findings show why errors happen as well as where.

Do you give legal advice on award or enterprise agreement interpretation?

No. PES identifies where interpretation, configuration and practice do not line up, and documents the questions that need an answer. Where a clause needs a legal or industrial relations view, we frame the question for your lawyers or IR team and record the decision so it can be configured and tested.

Can the review run while a system replacement is under way?

Yes. The findings feed the requirements, design decisions and test scenarios for the new system. It is easier to settle the current rules before design workshops than to discover them during parallel run.

Which systems does the review cover?

Whichever rostering, time and attendance, payroll and HR systems carry the process, plus the spreadsheets and interfaces between them. PES is independent of software vendors, so the findings are not tied to a product.

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Related insights

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