When your business needs to track labour costs across jobs, projects, or cost centres, a common question arises: Should your payroll system be doing this? Or is this the job of your ERP? If you’re a payroll or a finance leader in a large, complex organisation, understanding where payroll ends and ERP begins is crucial to gaining accurate insights – without duplicated effort or data blind spots.
The cost of inaccuracy: why labour allocation can break your system
You need to know exactly where your labour dollars are going. For organisations in construction, professional services, manufacturing, or government, allocating staff time and wages to the correct job, client, or project is essential. But without the right systems in place, payroll becomes a bottleneck – or worse, a black box.
Many enterprise systems promise cost tracking capabilities, but not all deliver the granularity or ease-of-use your team needs. This often leads to siloed systems, patchy data, and manual reconciliation that wastes time and risks compliance.
Payroll or ERP? Understanding the difference
ERP systems are powerful for managing financials, procurement, inventory, and overall business planning. Some ERP platforms also offer timesheeting capabilities – typically focused on capturing time against projects or activities for billing or project tracking purposes. However, they often lack the functionality needed to ensure accurate attendance tracking or employee payment.
That said, there is crossover. If the ERP system is capturing time that reflects an employee’s full workday, those transactions can be integrated with a robust payroll system. This allows payroll to accurately cost time against jobs, projects, or activities, and produce clean, reliable output. The benefit? Time only needs to be captured once, while still serving multiple business purposes – from project billing to payroll processing.
In short, ERP captures time for project tracking; payroll ensures that time is paid and costed correctly. The real power lies in smart integration between the two.
Integration is key
Modern payroll platforms – like Affinity Payroll – are designed to seamlessly integrate with ERP systems. Affinity Payroll includes advanced features like:
- Clever Timesheets – capture time against 12 configurable cost dimensions
- Costing IQ – analyse scheduled vs actual labour costs in real time
- Award Interpretation Engine – automatically adjust for rates, shifts, and allowances
- Two-way integration – connect with ERP platforms via API or file-based interfaces
You get the best of both worlds: a unified system where time is entered once and used across functions, enabling both accurate payroll and meaningful project insights.
The efficiency gains are significant: capturing time once eliminates manual duplication, reduces the risk of misallocated costs, and boosts overall accuracy. Your teams save time, and your data gets sharper – supporting better decisions across payroll, finance, and operations.
Affinity Payroll: your guide to smarter cost tracking
Affinity Payroll helps large organisations across Australia and New Zealand take control of their workforce data. Affinity Payroll empowers large organisations in Australia and New Zealand to:
- Capture project-coded time at the source – minimising errors at payroll stage
- Seamlessly integrate with leading ERP and finance systems
- Automate complex cost allocations – by task, job, equipment, or role
- Deliver clean costing data – ready for finance analysis, project billing, and audit
With Affinity, you don’t have to choose between payroll accuracy and project insight – you get both.
Take the next step: integrate payroll with project costing
Stop settling for disconnected systems and fuzzy labour cost data. Affinity Payroll helps you streamline payroll while delivering the job-level costing detail your business needs to make smarter decisions.
Ready to track labour costs by job, project, or cost centre – without the ERP headaches? Contact us today to learn how Affinity Payroll can help.
