This article draws on a conversation between Georgie Gilbert from Alltech, and Brett Cowan, founder of Payroll Experts Australia. Brett’s insights into payroll compliance, documentation, and organisational risk are drawn from over 15 years of consulting with Australian businesses.
Is It Time to Hand Your Payroll to the Experts?
There’s a pattern that Brett Cowan, founder of Payroll Experts Australia, has seen play out after 15 years of consulting with Australian businesses of every size and sector. A business is growing, the team is stretched, and somewhere along the way, payroll gets handed to someone whose primary job is something else entirely — the operations manager, the office administrator, the finance assistant. It feels like a sensible, cost-effective decision. But it’s not always the case.
At Alltech, we’ve seen the same thing from our side of the table. Business leaders come to us because they realise managing payroll isn’t as easy as they suspected. Or, given there has been no consistency in handing over payroll from one person to the next that they fear something could go wrong. So outsourcing becomes a viable option. Either way, the underlying issue is often the fact that payroll has never been treated as the specialised, high-stakes function it actually is
Payroll Is Not What Most Business Leaders Think It Is
Most executives and business owners have never had to think deeply about payroll. That’s not a criticism. It’s actually a sign that it’s been done well. When payroll works, nobody notices. People get paid on time, the right amount lands in their bank account, and everyone moves on. The payroll team, or payroll person, is invisible.
But as Brett describes it: “Doing it badly destroys trust. Doing it really well doesn’t build trust. It’s an assumed thing that should happen.”
This asymmetry is exactly why payroll gets underestimated as a risk. There’s no upside to celebrate, only downside to manage. And the downside, when it arrives, can be significant.
Georgie Gilbert, from Alltech, shared a firsthand example that illustrates this clearly. Her father owned a pub. He made a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable to him, choosing to pay his staff $3 more per hour across the board rather than paying one-off allowances due per 8-hour shift. He thought he was doing a nice thing for his team. When the allowances were not reflected on the pay slip, Fair Work saw it differently. He was fined $30,000, not because he underpaid his staff, but because the allowance wasn’t visible on the payslip as required.
“The compliance is just endless for businesses if you don’t look after it,” Georgie reflects. And the complexity behind it isn’t arbitrary – it exists because the system is trying to be fair. Shift workers at 1am on a Sunday are entitled to be paid differently from office workers at 10am on a Monday. Once you accept that principle, the specific and multiple rules and entitlements start to make sense. But navigating them requires genuine expertise.
The Risk of the 'Someone Handles It' Approach
One of the most telling questions Brett asks when he meets a new client is: how confident are you in your payroll compliance? The answer that worries him most is the confident one.
“If they say, ‘we’ve got that nailed, we don’t have an issue there’, that rings massive alarm bells for me. It tells me they’re not truly understanding the complexity.”
The organisations that are genuinely on top of their payroll compliance tend to speak about it with appropriate humility. They talk about the investment they’re making, the ongoing effort, the improvements they’re seeing. The ones who say it’s sorted often have one person who ‘just knows’ how it works but no documentation to back it up.
What happens when that person leaves?
Brett has seen it many times. The institutional knowledge walks out the door. The new person has no reference point. Systems start to be utilised differently, and configured differently. And interpretations change because no one has clarified exactly how this business interprets each of the clauses they’re required to pay to. And by the time it surfaces, often during a Fair Work audit, a payroll system migration, or a routine remediation, the business is then staring down the barrel of looking at years of inconsistent payments, potentially affecting dozens or hundreds of employees.
This is not a small-business problem. Businesses with 100, 500, even several thousand employees face exactly this scenario. The complexity scales with headcount, and so does the exposure.
The Real Cost of Keeping Payroll In-House
When business leaders run the numbers on an internal payroll function, they tend to count salary. What they don’t always count is the cost of getting it wrong.
Brett is direct about this: “If you’re not of a size to effectively run a competent payroll practice within your organisation, of course it makes sense to outsource it. The risk is that you get it wrong, and then you’re up for all sorts of money trying to remediate the problem you caused.”
Remediation which is the process of identifying, quantifying, and correcting underpayments is one of the most resource-intensive exercises a business can go through. It requires forensic analysis of payroll data, often going back years. It requires clear documentation of what interpretation was applied when, and why. It means communicating with employees, managing reputational risk, and potentially engaging with Fair Work. None of that is cheap and can take up incredible valuable resources in getting the work required complete.
The businesses that avoid it are, almost invariably, the ones that treated payroll as a specialised function from the outset – either by building genuine internal capability or by partnering with experts who do it every day.
Growth-Focused Businesses Outsource What Isn’t Core
The most successful business leaders we work with share a common mindset. They are focused on what creates value and growth in their business, and they are very clear about what doesn’t. They don’t try to be excellent at everything. They build excellent capability in the things that differentiate them, and they bring in specialists for everything else.
Brett applies this thinking to his own business. He is, by any measure, one of Australia’s authorities on payroll compliance and he outsources his own payroll. “It’s not a core business thing for me. I outsource marketing. I outsource accounting. I don’t have those functions in my business, because it’s not a value-add to me to do it extremely well.”
This is the same logic that underpins Alltech’s managed payroll service. Our clients are not small businesses figuring it out as they go. They are established businesses, typically with 100 or more employees, led by people who are focused on growing what they’ve built. They have made a deliberate decision that payroll, with all of its compliance requirements, award interpretations, Fair Work obligations, and legislative change, is something best handled by people for whom it is the core focus.
The result is not just reduced risk. It’s also freedom — the freedom to direct internal resources toward the work that moves the business forward.
What Good Payroll Compliance Actually Looks Like
One of the most valuable conversations Brett and his team have with prospective clients is around the question of documentation. Specifically: “Can you tell us, clearly and in writing, how your business interprets its payroll obligations?”
Most can’t. And as Brett points out, this isn’t laziness. It’s a genuine gap in the tools and language available to do it well. “I’m yet to see a single company who has done the capturing of their payroll and their pay obligations in a way that is anywhere near as simple and as easy and as human-centric as what we now have available.”
This is where the tool, Payroll Standard, comes in. Developed by Brett along with a developer he knew well, and who knew the payroll landscape well, it is changing what’s possible.
Payroll Standard gives organisations a structured, human-readable way to document exactly how they pay, how they interpret their awards and enterprise agreements, and what their obligations are. It creates a single source of truth that everyone in the organisation, from the payroll team to HR and legal, can read and understand.
For clients working with Alltech, the principle is the same. You should be able to trust that your payroll is being run consistently, compliantly, and with full visibility – without having to become a payroll expert yourself.
The Questions Worth Asking Right Now
If you’re a business leader who hasn’t examined your payroll function lately, here are the questions that matter:
Is your payroll documented?
Not in someone’s head, or buried in system configurations that nobody can extract, but in a form that any competent person could pick up and understand?
What would happen if your payroll manager left tomorrow?
Does the knowledge live in the system, or in the person?
How confident are you in your award and agreement interpretations?
Not conceptually but specifically, for your business, your workforce, and your conditions?
Is payroll taking up internal capacity that should be directed elsewhere?
Could the time, energy, and risk management overhead be better spent?
These are not trick questions, and there are no wrong answers – only honest ones. The businesses that ask them and act on the answers tend to be the ones that avoid the expensive, time-consuming, and reputationally damaging situations that payroll non-compliance creates.
Managed Payroll: What It Means in Practice
When businesses partner with Alltech for managed payroll, they’re not just offloading a task. They’re gaining a team that is entirely focused on getting it right every pay run.. Payroll is all we do.
That means staying current with Fair Work updates, award changes, and legislative shifts. It means applying consistent interpretations, maintaining clear records, and providing the kind of visibility that means compliance is not simply assumed.
It also means having someone to call. Payroll questions often arise at inconvenient times and require a real answer from someone who knows your business, how you pay your people and what is compliant. That’s what a genuine managed payroll relationship provides.
For businesses that are ready to treat payroll as the strategic function it is, the conversation usually starts simply: let us understand your current situation, your workforce, and your obligations – and show you what consistent, expert-led payroll actually looks like.
If you want consistency in your payroll operations
If you’ve had no consistency in your payroll operations and are considering outsourcing it to local experts, speak to our team here at Alltech.
Payroll management is what we do.