How to Manage Multi-Award Payroll in Australia

How to Manage Multi-Award Payroll in Australia

Introduction

This video explains how to manage employees under a multi-award system in Australia, with a focus on sectors like SCHADS, nursing, and aged care. It discusses the challenges of working across multiple awards, why most payroll systems struggle with this, and how Fair Work intends awards to be applied. The video also highlights exceptions, such as the Road Transport Award, and provides a practical solution using hybrid award templates. These templates allow flexibility for employees to move between awards from one shift to the next while remaining compliant with agreements and regulations.

Key Takeaways

• Multi-award systems are complex and often require manual management.
• Most payroll systems struggle with multi-award scenarios, though some labour hire systems can handle them.
• Fair Work’s guideline generally assigns an employee to the award covering the majority of their work.
• Certain awards, like the Road Transport Award, allow for multiple types of work under different award rules.
• Hybrid award templates can combine two or more awards, enabling flexible shift assignments.
• Customer or employee agreements can support multi-award arrangements when needed.

Transcript

Introduction and Multi-Award Challenges

Very good question. So if you're on a multi-award system, hats off to you. It's one of the hardest situations you can have in Australia, and you probably find that you're doing a lot of it manually. There aren't a lot of systems out there that handle multi-award scenarios very well. There are specific labour hire systems in the market that can do it, but generally the proprietary payroll products do struggle with it a little bit, and I'm going to explain why.

Fair Work Guidelines and Award Allocation

Fair Work's intention with awards isn't to have employees working in different parts of the week on different awards. It's actually meant to be more like a 50% plus rule, where you're saying, the majority of the time, what is this employee doing? That should determine the award that they're on. There are exceptions to that. One that comes to mind is the Road Transport Award, where you can do both short-distance trips and long-distance trips, and they're separate awards. But generally speaking, things like in our space—SCHADS, nurses, aged care—they're very defined, separate awards.

Managing Multiple Awards and Hybrid Templates

So don't feel compelled that you need to go from one award for one shift to another award on the next shift. However, if you have a customer agreement in place, or something like that in place with your employee, it can be supported. What we do is build a brand new template. We call it a hybrid award template, but we're basically building two or more awards into one template to allow you the flexibility to move between awards from one shift to the next. So yes, it's possible. Hats off to you if that's your situation.