EBA payroll
Your EBA is not a Modern Award. Your payroll engine needs to know the difference.
15 minutes, your EBA, no sales script.
Blind spots
What pre built awards cannot see
These are the clauses we find in real construction agreements that generic engines do not model. Each one is a live underpayment or overpayment risk.
Minimum weekly super contributions
Many construction agreements require the greater of a flat dollar amount per week or the SG percentage. A pre built award engine calculates the percentage and stops. Under payday super, where contributions move with wages, a missing floor becomes a shortfall every single pay run rather than once a quarter.
Multi year wage rate steps
Agreements commonly set rate increases years in advance, often at dates that do not line up with the award's annual review. The engine has to know the schedule and step itself, without someone remembering to edit a rate table.
RDO banking rules
Typically 0.8 hours accrued per qualifying day, banked to a balance, with a capped draw down and rules for shutdown and substituted days. Generic leave codes cannot model an accrual that comes out of ordinary hours worked.
Site allowance schedules
Site allowance is often tied to project value bands and, in some agreements, to named job sites. That means the allowance depends on which job the hours were worked on, not on the employee's classification.
All purpose rates
Where an agreement folds industry and tool allowances into an all purpose rate, paying those allowances separately double pays them. Getting this wrong is expensive in the other direction, and it is easy to miss when a rate table is imported without the clause context.
Fares on RDO days and picnic day
Fares and travel treatment on RDOs, and picnic day provisions, are the kind of clauses that never appear in a modern award template and are routinely dropped during a system migration.
Method
How we build your agreement into the engine
01
Clause by clause extraction
We start from your registered agreement, sourced from the Fair Work Commission register, and extract every clause with a pay consequence: rates, allowances, accruals, sequences, super, travel and leave.
02
Configuration in the payroll engine
Each clause becomes a rule in the engine, with the clause reference recorded against it so the interpretation is documented rather than remembered.
03
Reverse audit
We read the built configuration back out and diff it against the agreement. Every clause must have a matching rule and every rule must have a source clause. Anything unmatched is either a gap or an assumption, and both get resolved before testing.
The reverse audit is the step most implementations skip. Building rules from a document is straightforward. Proving the built system matches the document, in both directions, is what makes the result defensible.
Testing
Tested before you go live
Six synthetic pay run scenarios, each of which must produce the agreement correct result before a real pay run happens.
A 10 hour weekday
Ordinary hours, then the overtime sequence in clause order, with crib and rest provisions applied where they bite.
A Saturday
Weekend sequence, minimum engagement and the correct treatment of allowances that only apply to ordinary time.
An RDO day
Accrual, draw down against the banked balance, and the fares and travel treatment your agreement specifies for RDOs.
A public holiday
Holiday rates, worked versus not worked, and interaction with RDOs and shutdown periods.
A wet weather day
Inclement weather provisions, transferred duties and whether allowances continue for the affected hours.
A low hours week
The one that catches problems. Short weeks expose missing minimum weekly super floors and minimum engagement rules that a full week hides completely.
More detail on the specific clauses in minimum weekly super, RDO rules and rate increases, and on the migration itself in the go live checklist.
EBA payroll questions
Is my EBA public?
Yes. Every approved enterprise agreement is published on the Fair Work Commission register, so we can source the registered instrument directly rather than working from a scanned copy in someone's inbox.
What if our EBA has expired?
An expired agreement can continue to apply, or rates may be governed by a successor instrument or the modern award. We confirm which instrument is actually in force before configuring anything, because building the wrong one carefully is still wrong.
What about the leave loading?
The 17.5 per cent annual leave loading is one of the most commonly missed enterprise agreement entitlements, particularly on termination payouts. It is explicitly built and explicitly tested.
Who maintains the rules after go live?
We do. When rate steps land, the agreement is replaced or the award moves, we rebuild, re test and tell you what changed.
Do we still get a parallel pay run?
Yes. Synthetic scenarios come first, then a full parallel run against your existing system compared line by line before you rely on us.
Reviewed August 2026. General information, not legal advice.
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Send us your agreement and we will tell you what we would build.
Give us the agreement and the award you rely on. We come back with the clauses that matter, how we would test them and what it costs.
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