HR & Payroll /Decisioning live field guide · 8 min

Timesheet-to-Payroll Reconciler

Pulls approved hours into the pay run and flags overtime spikes, missing breaks and absent clock-offs for review — turning a two-day reconcile into an hour.

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theater/demos/hr-payroll_timesheet-to-payroll-reconciler.html · sandbox · read-only

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FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads each employee's timesheet against the applicable modern award, flags every pay variance with the clause behind it, and surfaces a drafted correction for a payroll officer to approve before anything reaches the pay run.

Input 01

Timesheets + the award rules

A fortnight of timesheets — system exports and scanned paper alike — plus the employee's classification and the pay rates, penalties and allowances from the applicable modern award.

Agent 02

Matches, prices, flags

Reads the hours, applies the award's ordinary, Saturday, overtime and allowance rates, and compares what was paid against what the award requires — line by line, with the clause shown.

Output 03

A flagged correction, for review

A reconciliation with every variance, the dollar difference and a drafted back-pay note — laid out for a payroll officer to review, correct and approve before it enters the pay run. Nothing is posted on its own.

Where it works well

It does the rate-by-rate award check on every line, every pay run, and shows the clause behind each flag.

Done by hand the reconcile is a one-to-two-day job, and the award check is the first thing skipped under deadline pressure.
Best for a payroll officer running variable rosters: casual-heavy retail, hospitality, warehousing and construction teams on award rates.
At 50-plus employees on penalties and allowances, the recaptured days go back into resolving the genuine exceptions, not re-keying the clean ones.

The slow, invisible cost of payroll is the cross-checking — tracing a Saturday shift or an overtime hour back to the right penalty rate in an award that runs to dozens of clauses, for every employee, every fortnight.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when the award classification or the rates behind it are stale — and the output looks more authoritative than the data feeding it.

Weak where a shift doesn't map cleanly to one penalty — split shifts, shift-swaps, annualised-salary arrangements that need a judgement call. It should flag, not assume.
Scanned paper timesheets with ambiguous handwriting introduce OCR error; a misread start time becomes a wrong variance the officer must catch.
If most of your workforce is salaried with no award penalties, there is little for the rate check to find, and your existing process already covers it.

The honest test

If you cannot say, right now, which award and classification each employee sits under and that the rates are current to today, this tool makes your wrong answer faster, not safer.

Point it at last year's pay rates, or an employee mapped to the wrong award classification, and it produces a clean, professional reconciliation full of variances that are themselves wrong. That is the trap.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It drafts the correction. A payroll officer approves it. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces each variance with the paid rate, the award rate, and the clause it checked against

Shows the dollar difference per line and the net adjustment

Flags every shift it could not match cleanly to a penalty or allowance

WHAT IT WON’T

Post the correction or finalise the pay run

Decide an employee's award classification

Certify the pay run as Fair Work compliant

Underpayment of award entitlements is a contravention of the Fair Work Act 2009 enforceable by the Fair Work Ombudsman, and the figures flow into Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO. A wrong rate has consequences for the employee and the employer's legal standing, so the accountable person stays on the decision — the consequence lands on them, not the tool.

What your data has to look like

Hours as legible records, each employee tied to a current award classification, and rates that are in force today.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Timesheets in a consistent, legible form

Usual weak point

Each employee mapped to an award and classification level

Needs shaping

Current award pay rates, machine-readable

Needs shaping

The roster or agreed ordinary hours to compare against

Usual weak point

The pay-run export the timesheet feeds

Usually ready

The real first job

The award classification mapping and the current rate table are usually the weak point — held as a spreadsheet someone updates by hand each July, or not updated at all. Getting employees correctly classified and the rates kept current is usually the real first job — larger and more valuable than the reconciliation layer on top. Once the inputs are clean, every pay run after that is faster and right by default.

Right fit if…

You run fortnightly pay for 50-plus employees on award penalties and allowances

Variable rosters — casual or part-time retail, hospitality, warehousing, construction

You can point to each employee's current award classification and the rates in force today

Your reconcile today is a one-to-two-day manual cross-check against the award

Walk away if…

Your workforce is salaried with no award penalties or overtime to reconcile

Award classifications are guessed or out of date and nobody owns them

Pay rates live as last year's pay guide that nobody has refreshed

You need a tool that signs off the pay run as compliant for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It can produce a wrong variance — which is exactly why nothing is posted on its say-so. For each line it shows the paid rate, the award rate it applied, the clause behind it, and a flag wherever it could not match a shift cleanly to a penalty. A payroll officer checks those before approving. The tool surfaces the numbers and the clause; the person stands behind the correction.

It reads both, but scanned paper carries OCR risk — a misread 07:00 as 09:00 becomes a wrong variance, so the officer reviews the flagged lines against the original. The bigger dependency is the award data: each employee tied to the right classification and current rates. Getting timesheets into a consistent legible form and the classifications correct is usually the first piece of work, and the piece that pays off across every pay run after.

No. It removes the line-by-line award cross-check — the one-to-two days of tracing each shift to a penalty rate — so the payroll officer spends their time on the genuine exceptions: whether a classification is right, whether a shift-swap was authorised, whether a back-pay needs explaining to the employee. The pay run is still theirs to approve. The capacity it frees goes back into the judgement calls.

Current to today. Modern award rates are reviewed and reissued — the annual wage review updates them each July, and the Superannuation Guarantee stepped up to 12% on 1 July 2025 — and an employee’s classification can change. Point it at last year’s pay guide and it produces confidently wrong variances. The honest test: do you know, today, which award and classification each employee sits under and that the rates are the ones in force?

Pay data, hours and personal details are sensitive information under the Privacy Act, and the figures feed Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO. Any deployment runs against your own systems and data handling, not a shared pool — we scope where the data sits and who can see it as part of the build. The demo here runs entirely on fabricated data; Mehmet Yilmaz and Hume Distribution Co are not real.

No. It checks each line against the award rates it is given and flags where the paid rate sits below the award rate, but it does not certify compliance. Award interpretation, classification decisions and the National Employment Standards remain the employer’s obligation under the Fair Work Act 2009 — a person confirms those for each pay run. The tool gets the reconciliation most of the way; the accountable person closes the gap.

What it takes to build

3–5 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Claude · OCR · rules engine · review UI

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your payroll team?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — one award, one pay run, low risk. Tell us where the reconcile hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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