In Australian workplace law, awards and enterprise agreements are both legal instruments that set out minimum employment conditions – but they differ in scope, negotiation, and flexibility:
When managing payroll, businesses have two main options:
But which option is the best fit for your business? Let’s break it down.
Hiring the right candidate plays an essential role in the growth of the company. A candidate with the right talent, skills, and knowledge will help your business thrive in this ever-growing competitive world.
One of the best ways to hire a talented candidate is by focusing on an effective and engaging job description. Putting your efforts into crafting a detailed job position description can bring in a wide range of highly talented candidates into your pipeline and ensure you hire a suitable one for the job.
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.
Most companies do not fully appreciate the losses incurred due to poor time and attendance record keeping . Manual and paper-based timesheets rely heavily on human intervention, making them difficult to manage at scale and vulnerable to small errors that compound over time.
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