Two hundred employees. KeyPay. Paper timesheets from site supervisors.
Every fortnight, the payroll manager spent three days fixing the pay run after it had already gone out. Three days. Not on payroll. On corrections to payroll.
The obvious assumption is data entry. Someone fat-fingered the hours, typed 8 instead of 10, missed a shift. That wasn't it. The data entry was fine. The hours matched what the supervisors wrote down. KeyPay calculated exactly what it was given.
The errors were governance errors.
A timesheet comes in showing 10 hours on a Monday. KeyPay processes 10 ordinary hours. But the Building and Construction General On-site Award (MA000020) says ordinary hours max out at 8 per day, which means those last 2 hours are overtime at 150%, and the timesheet didn't flag it because timesheets record what happened, not what should have happened. KeyPay didn't flag it because it was given 10 ordinary hours and it processed 10 ordinary hours. Nobody compared the timesheet against the award before hitting run.
The fares allowance was worse. Under clause 25, the award pays a flat daily allowance for each day a worker starts and finishes on a construction site. But the paper timesheet didn't always capture which site, or whether the worker was on-site versus in the yard. Just hours. Date. Supervisor signature. Payroll had no way to know whether the allowance should apply because the information needed to determine it wasn't in the data they received.
Then wet weather. Worker gets sent home after four hours because of rain. Under clause 24, the inclement weather provisions entitle the worker to payment at ordinary rates for the hours they couldn't work, drawn from a 32-hour bank per four-week period. The timesheet says four hours worked. But it doesn't trigger the wet weather entitlement for the remaining hours because nobody coded the reason for the short day. Payroll processes four. The correction comes through the following fortnight after the worker or their delegate raises it, and by then everyone's moved on and it's another back-pay adjustment added to the pile.
Every one of these errors followed the same pattern. The timesheet recorded the facts. Payroll calculated on the facts. But the facts alone aren't enough. You need the facts compared against the award rules to know whether the pay is correct, and that comparison wasn't happening anywhere in the process, not before payment, not during payment, only after, when someone complained or when the payroll manager manually spot-checked and caught it.
Three days of corrections per fortnight. Across 200 employees. That's roughly 15% of the payroll team's time spent undoing what was already done. Not building anything. Not improving anything. Rework.
The fix was straightforward in concept. Run a shadow calculation before the pay run, not after. Take the timesheet data, apply the award rules, compare the result against what KeyPay is about to process, and flag the variances with the specific clause reference: timesheet says 10 ordinary hours, MA000020 clause 29 read with clause 16 says overtime applies after 8; fares allowance may apply per clause 25, site data missing; inclement weather entitlement per clause 24 not triggered.
The payroll manager reviews the exceptions before submitting. Not after payment. Not next fortnight. Before money moves.
The corrections didn't stop because the data got better. The data was always fine. The corrections stopped because someone finally put a governance check between the timesheet and the pay run.