We understand that keeping track of penalty rates and work hours is essential to meet Fair Work obligations and comply with modern awards like the SCHADS Award 2024. To stay compliant with Fair Work regulations, businesses need to accurately track hours, overtime, and penalty rates, which can quickly become overwhelming if not managed correctly. Without the right tools, these challenges can significantly drain resources and cause operational inefficiencies.
Therefore, investing in a reliable HR and payroll system can simplify this process by automating time tracking, ensuring correct wage calculations, and maintaining compliance with evolving award conditions. But first of all, we need to understand what penalty rates are, so let’s dive in.
Understanding Penalty Rates in Australia
Penalty rates are additional wages paid to employees for working outside of normal working hours, such as weekends, public holidays, or overtime. These rates are governed by modern awards, which set the minimum wage conditions for different industries.For businesses covered by SCHADS Award 2024, thoroughly understanding employee entitlements will help to save significant costs.
Here are some common scenarios that require penalty rates:
- Weekend shifts: Employees are entitled to higher pay rates for working on Saturdays and Sundays (150% and 200% respectively)
- Public holidays: Increased rates often apply for work performed on public holidays (250%)
- Overtime: Extra pay is required for work beyond regular hours or agreed shift lengths
Problems with Manual Tracking
Tracking penalty rates and hours manually with excel sheets can lead to errors that affect employee wages and compliance. Missteps in calculating penalty rates or interpreting the SCHADS Award 2024 can result in underpayments, legal consequences, as well as loss of employee trust. To emphasise the earlier point further, ensuring correct payments requires a software that automatically stays up to date with any changes to the modern awards and applying them accurately during payroll processing.
How Workstem Simplifies Compliance
Workstem, an all-in-one HR and payroll software, takes the guesswork out of tracking penalty rates and hours by automating key processes. These features include:
- Automating the interpretation of modern awards, including the SCHADS Award 2024
- Providing real-time tracking of employee hours across different pay periods
- Calculating penalty rates and overtime automatically based on award rules
- Offering customizable reports for easy auditing and compliance checks
- Simplifies the scheduling process by automatically applying penalty rates for late shifts, weekends, and public holidays.
- Employees can log hours and access their schedules via mobile apps, ensuring real-time updates and transparency.
To Wrap Up
As the SCHADS Award 2024 and other modern awards continue to evolve, having a reliable system in place becomes increasingly important. Workstem’s commitment to staying updated with the latest changes in Australian labour law ensures that businesses using their platform remain compliant and efficient in their payroll processes.
By simplifying the complex task of tracking penalty rates and hours, Workstem empowers businesses to focus on delivering quality care and services to their communities, which is what matters most.
How Does Workstem Help?
Simplify your payroll process and ensure accurate pay rates with Workstem’s automated payroll system. Our pre-built modern award interpretation software covers 122+ awards and 34 EBAs, and keeps you up-to-date with penalty rates and other award entitlements.
Choose between our Standard and Advanced plans, and enjoy a range of benefits such as Fair Work compliance, an employee self-service App, and custom rule set. We have integrated our system with Microsoft and Netsuite to provide you with a complete HR SaaS solution for your business.
Book a free demo with our payroll experts. Experience the efficiency and accuracy of Workstem today!