Every July, the FWC publishes new award rates. Your WFM vendor sends an email confirming they've updated the base rate, and most payroll teams read that email and move on, assuming the job is done. It isn't.
Under the Retail Award alone, 47 derived values move when the base rate moves. Casual loading. Saturday penalties. Sunday penalties at 150% for permanents and 175% for casuals, because the 25% casual loading is added on top of the base penalty. Public holidays at 225% for permanents, 250% for casuals. Evening work. Two tiers of overtime. Six junior rates, each a different percentage of the adult rate. Apprentice rates across four year levels. Meal allowances indexed to a separate number entirely.
Your vendor updated one of those.
The other 46 are sitting in your system as flat dollar amounts from last year, and unless someone manually recalculates each one against the new base and updates every pay item in every payroll configuration, they'll stay exactly where they are. Wrong.
How do you know they're configured properly? You don't. Deputy stores $30.13. Not "125% of the minimum hourly rate under clause 17.2 of MA000004." A flat number. When the input changes, that $30.13 doesn't recalculate. It just sits there, quietly incorrect, while the pay run balances and the payslip looks normal and the casual working Sundays doesn't memorise her rate to the cent.
The drift starts small. $2.40 per shift. But across 400 Sunday shifts a week, across 38 stores, for a few months, that's a five-figure remediation building itself one quiet pay run at a time and nobody sees it because both systems report "compliant" within their own boundaries.
This is not a payroll problem. Payroll calculated exactly what it was given. Not a WFM problem either. The WFM scheduled correctly. The problem lives in the space between them, the assumption that when one system updated, the other would follow, and the fact that nothing, no process, no tool, no person, checks whether they still agree with each other after the rate change goes through.
Woolworths has disclosed more than $571 million and counting. Super Retail Group, $52.7 million. Bunnings, more than $6 million. Every case, the base rates were correct. The derived values had drifted. Inputs were fine. The cascade was broken.
The real problem isn't the systems. It's what's between them.
July's coming again.