Most businesses don’t realise their payroll process is broken—until it’s too late.
Payroll errors, delays, or compliance breaches are often the first sign that something’s wrong behind the scenes. By then, the damage is done: costly fines, budget blowouts, unhappy staff, and a hit to your reputation as an employer.
So, how do you know if your payroll process is holding you back?
Here are the 10 common red flags—and what you can do about them.
Many businesses still rely on Excel to build and publish rosters.
In theory, spreadsheets can get the job done. In reality, they create more problems than they solve—especially as your business grows or things get busy.
Manual rostering opens you up to:
-
Compliance risks: Rostering errors can breach Modern Awards, leading to underpayments and potential complaints to the Fair Work Ombudsman.
-
Staffing mistakes: Common errors like double shifts, rostering staff when they’re on leave, or scheduling unavailable casuals can leave you short-staffed and frustrate your team.
-
Wasted admin time: Every revision means lost time—and the more errors you make, the more time you waste.
-
Misused skillsets: Assigning the wrong person to the wrong role (like putting a junior in charge of a shift) hurts productivity, morale, and retention.
-
Budget blowouts: Overtime and overstaffing often slip through the cracks with manual rostering. You might not notice the problem until the payroll report lands on your desk.
Manual rosters aren’t just slow to build—they’re even slower to fix.
When mistakes happen (and they will), staff push back, leave requests get missed, and you end up in a loop of edits and reissues.
The result? Confusion, frustration, and mixed messages.
Your team doesn’t know which version is correct, and managers waste hours juggling changes.
3. Paper Timesheets
Time theft is real.
According to the Australian Federal Police, employee theft—including time theft—costs businesses over $1.5 billion a year. Paper timesheets make it easy for staff to fudge hours, buddy punch, or drag out shifts.
Poor record-keeping.
Paper is a nightmare when it comes to audits. Finding old timesheets takes time you don’t have. And if your records are incomplete or unclear, you’re opening yourself up to compliance breaches and fines.
Clerical errors.
Illegible handwriting and manual data entry mistakes are common—and costly. With an average error rate of 4%, paper timesheets slow down payroll and create more work fixing errors that should have been avoided in the first place.
In many businesses, timesheets are still manually checked against rosters—usually by a supervisor signing off before passing them to payroll.
This step is not only slow—it’s risky.
Errors in attendance, missed breaks, or incorrect shift codes can slip through, leading to blown labour costs and incorrect pays.
And the more manual steps in your payroll process, the more chances for mistakes, delays, and frustration down the line.
Australia’s workplace laws are some of the most complex in the world.
Yet many businesses still rely on managers—or even payroll staff—to manually interpret pay conditions.
That’s a compliance disaster waiting to happen.
Even experienced teams can miss key Award conditions like minimum breaks, span of hours, or penalty rates. And when mistakes happen, they don’t just hit your budget—they can land your business in headlines for all the wrong reasons.
It’s not just a compliance risk. It’s an efficiency killer.
Manually reviewing timesheets against Awards means double-handling, back-and-forth approvals, and last-minute fixes. And even then, you’re never 100% confident it’s right.
Missing timesheets. Ambiguous handwriting. Unclear hours.
Every payroll team knows the drill—wasting hours each week chasing managers and employees for clarification.
Does ‘7.5’ mean 7 hours 30 minutes? Or 7 hours 50? Why is John Smith’s timesheet missing again?
This back-and-forth creates unnecessary bottlenecks. It holds up your entire payroll process, causes stress, and puts your pay run at risk of delays—or errors.
Leave might seem simple—but it becomes a headache when handled manually.
Paper forms, emails, spreadsheets—they all add friction. Payroll teams waste time chasing approvals, checking leave balances, and updating records by hand.
Mistakes are easy to make.
Missing approvals, inaccurate balances, or forgetting to process leave can throw out your payroll and frustrate employees. The bigger your team, the harder this is to manage without an automated system.
8. Paper-Based Employee Onboarding
Paper-based onboarding is still surprisingly common—but it’s one of the slowest, clunkiest parts of the payroll process.
From sending contracts by post to chasing missing documents, manual onboarding can drag out for days (or weeks).
And if it’s not done before payroll cut-off? You’ll be scrambling to collect missing info at the last minute, holding up the entire pay run.
It’s not just inefficient—it creates a poor first impression for your new hires.
Still keying payroll data in by hand? That’s a recipe for errors and delays.
Without an integrated system, payroll teams are stuck re-entering hours from timesheets into payroll software every week.
Sure, you might get the basics right—tax, super—but complex Award conditions like penalty rates or allowances are easily missed.
And as always, clerical errors creep in—whether it’s a typo, misread timesheet, or simply bad handwriting. Every mistake creates another bottleneck, with more time wasted fixing errors that could have been avoided.
Even after all that manual work, some businesses still review pay runs using printed reports.
Finance managers spend hours combing through pages, marking up errors in pen, and sending them back for corrections. Only then are payslips created and payments processed.
It’s slow. It’s manual. And it leaves you exposed to errors right up until payday.
Whether your process looks exactly like this—or you recognise a few of these red flags—it’s time to rethink how you’re running payroll.
Efficient payroll isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about removing the manual, error-prone steps that slow you down and put your business at risk.
With the right systems in place, you can:
-
Reduce manual handling and double-handling.
-
Eliminate errors and payroll delays.
-
Ensure compliance with complex Award conditions.
-
Free up your team to focus on higher-value work, not chasing timesheets or correcting data entry.
Smart businesses are moving to automated payroll systems that integrate rostering, timesheets, and pay runs—removing the bottlenecks and making compliance simpler and more accurate.
Pay Cat are payroll specialists dedicated to helping Australian businesses simplify payroll and ensure 100% compliance with modern awards. As Employment Hero Payroll experts, we provide tailored solutions that streamline payroll processes, reduce errors, and save time.
See how Pay Cat can simplify payroll for your business.
Book a demo today.
