Updated 1 September 2026: This article has been updated with recent Australian payroll underpayment cases and current information about payroll compliance.

Payroll underpayments are not limited to small businesses with poor record keeping. Some of Australia’s largest employers have discovered payroll errors running for years, often because the rules sitting between an employee’s recorded hours and their final pay were not applied correctly.

The scale of the problem is significant. The Fair Work Ombudsman recovered $358 million for more than 249,000 underpaid workers in 2024-25 alone. Around 60% of those recoveries came from large corporate employers.

ClockOn’s free payroll software continues to support small Australian businesses with everything they need to manage payroll and meet ATO requirements.

With over two decades of experience in workforce management, we understand the pressure small businesses face when it comes to payroll compliance. That’s why our ClockOn Starter package is designed to remove barriers, offering an easy, effective, and compliant payroll solution at no charge forupto12months.

As per the 30th of March 2020, the Australian Government has created the JobKeeper payment subsidy.

Accurate employee time tracking captures the shift that actually happened. If someone stays 20 minutes to close the shop, a timesheet copied from the roster can miss that work. Multiply the same mistake across a team and payroll starts drifting away from reality.

The best way to track employee hours depends on where people work, how often shifts change and how much checking payroll needs. A spreadsheet can suit a small team with straightforward hours. Mobile clock-ins, online timesheets and attendance kiosks give businesses more ways to capture changes as they happen.

STP is new way of reporting tax and super information to the ATO. Businesses with 20 or more employees already report this way but, on 1 July 2019, it was expanded to include employers with 19 or fewer employees. The information is sent to the ATO either directly from your payroll software, or via a third party provider.

Earlier, it was confirmed by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) that from 1 July 2021, all small employers will have to register for Single Touch Payroll (STP). This published document consists of all the critical information related to single touch payroll for employees.

In this blog, we have clubbed together all the necessary guidelines related to ATO single touch payroll reporting including exemption details, benefits, reporting options, software solutions, and more.

Understanding the true cost of payroll is essential to keeping your wages under control. Poorly calculated pay rates, unseen payroll “on-costs” and inefficient payroll processes all contribute to an overall payroll overspend (impacting your bottom line).

Our calculator help you understand the "true cost" of all the other costs you need to spend money on when taking on an extra employee.

Terminating employees can be the hardest thing a manager or HR officer has to do.

A termination letter notifies an employee that he or she is no longer required, explains the reasons, the next steps in the process and sometimes stipulates the payout balances such as annual leave and redundancy, if applicable.