For Local Government & Public Sector
Six agreements, one payroll team, and no room for error
Indoor staff, outdoor staff, libraries, childcare, waste, aquatic centres, rangers. One organisation, one pay run, and rules that barely resemble each other.
Higher duties, on-call and standby, flexitime and TOIL, nine-day fortnights, RDOs and long service leave portability in Australia, and the service-based entitlements your New Zealand collective agreements set – all modelled in the system rather than held together by institutional memory and a spreadsheet.
Affinity gives councils, authorities and agencies across Australia and New Zealand one payroll that holds every concurrent agreement – Australian enterprise agreements and New Zealand collective agreements alike – with higher duties, on-call, TOIL and nine-day fortnights applied per employee. It is ISO 27001:2022 certified with data hosted onshore, and reports cost by department and fund.
Who This Is For
This is for councils, statutory authorities, council-controlled organisations and government agencies across Australia and New Zealand – organisations running many concurrent agreements, under audit, spending public money.
If one person in your payroll team is the only one who knows how a particular entitlement works, this page is for you.
Public money deserves
public-grade accuracy.
The challenge
- • Multiple enterprise agreements running side by side
- • Higher duties, allowances, on-call and standby across depots
- • Flexitime, TOIL, nine-day fortnights and Australian RDOs
- • Long service leave portability schemes in Australia; Holidays Act leave in New Zealand
The impact
- • A payroll error becomes a council meeting item, then a media story
- • Audit findings your team spends the next year responding to
- • Knowledge concentrated in one or two long-serving officers
- • Departmental cost reporting rebuilt manually every budget cycle
A better way
Every dollar you spend is visible to the people who funded it. Your team should be spending it on services – not on manual checking that a properly configured system would never have needed.
The Rules You Actually Run
And the assurance your auditors will ask about.
Many EBAs
Indoor, outdoor, libraries, childcare, waste and aquatic – one payroll
TOIL & flexi
Accrual and drawdown, nine-day fortnights and Australian RDOs held in the system
ISO 27001
Certified to ISO 27001:2022 with independent audit
Onshore
Data hosted in Australia and New Zealand as standard, not on request
Six agreements, interpreted per employee – not per pay run
Councils are among the hardest payrolls in either country precisely because they are several payrolls wearing one uniform. Affinity holds each agreement separately and applies the right one to the right person, from the roster and the actual worked time.
- Higher duties applied automatically when the conditions are met
- On-call, standby, recall and depot allowances triggered by conditions, not memory
- Flexitime and TOIL accrual and drawdown, nine-day fortnights and Australian RDOs
- Australian long service leave including portability scheme reporting, and New Zealand Holidays Act leave calculations
- A custom rules layer for the provisions unique to your agreements
One council, one pay run
Assurance, sovereignty and a procurement process that works
Public sector buying is different, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time. You need to specify what you are buying, evidence why, and defend it afterwards. Affinity is structured to make that straightforward.
- ISO 27001:2022 certified with independent audit – see our security posture
- Data hosted in Australia and New Zealand as the standard arrangement
- Three clearly separated delivery models with transparent pricing – easy to specify, easy to compare
- Role-based access control and a full audit trail on pay data
- A free selection toolkit – RFP template, weighted scoring tool and evaluator's guide – usable with any shortlist
What you can put in a tender response
Cost by department, fund and program – straight from payroll
Budget monitoring, annual report disclosures and portfolio reporting all draw on the same underlying number. It should come out of the payroll data, not out of a reconciliation someone does by hand.
- Labour cost attributed to department, fund, program and cost centre as it is incurred
- Overtime, on-call and higher duties spend visible against budget in-period
- GL export configured to your finance system's format, described in plain English
- Direct BI connectivity for Power BI and Tableau reporting packs
Labour cost by portfolio, year to date
Illustrative view of how labour cost is attributed across portfolios and funds.
Your path through local government procurement and into production
Scope what you are actually buying
We map your agreements and entitlements against the three delivery models, so the specification reflects your complexity rather than a generic template.
Prove value in two cycles
Parallel runs against real historical data give you matched results to show your executive and your auditors before go-live.
Get the knowledge out of one head
Entitlements modelled in the system rather than remembered by a long-serving officer. Succession stops being a risk on your register.
What's at risk?
Without Affinity
- A payroll error that becomes a public one
- Audit findings you spend the next year responding to
- Entitlement knowledge sitting with one or two people
- Departmental cost rebuilt by hand every budget cycle
- Manual workarounds that no one has documented
With Affinity
- Every agreement modelled and applied consistently
- An audit trail that answers the question before it is asked
- Entitlements held in the system, not in institutional memory
- Portfolio and fund cost reporting straight from payroll
- Onshore hosting and ISO 27001:2022 certification
The five things councils always ask
We are not going to pretend a payroll replacement in the public sector is a small undertaking. Here are the honest answers.
"We have to go to tender."
Good – that works in your favour here. Three clearly separated delivery models with transparent pricing make it much easier to specify and score what you are buying. Use our free selection toolkit if it helps, whoever ends up on your shortlist.
"Our data has to stay onshore."
It does. Affinity hosts in Australia and New Zealand as standard, and is ISO 27001:2022 certified with independent audit. Onshore residency is the default arrangement, not a premium option or a special request.
"We run six agreements. No vendor handles that."
Several do it badly by asking you to run six configurations. Affinity models each agreement and applies the correct one per employee within a single pay run – including the provisions that differ between indoor and outdoor staff.
"Our last implementation was a public failure."
Then you already know the warning signs. We prove value in two cycles rather than two years, run parallel against your live payroll, and do not switch anything over until the numbers match. You will see whether it is working long before you are committed.
"Our entitlements aren't written down anywhere."
They are – in the agreements. Affinity parses the actual documents rather than asking your team to translate them into configuration screens, which is usually the first time in years that everything gets written down in one place.
Explore Award InterpretationImagine an audit you're not worried about
Picture this: the auditor asks how higher duties are calculated for outdoor staff. You show them the rule in the system, the agreement clause it came from, and the audit trail on every payment it produced. That is the whole conversation.
Your finance team pulls labour cost by portfolio for the budget review without asking payroll for anything. And when your most experienced payroll officer finally retires, the entitlements stay behind.
That's not a dream. That's Affinity.
Trusted in the public sector
"It's obvious that Urshula cares deeply about payroll outcomes for Public Trust and our team here as individuals."– Dana Nessia, People Operations Lead, Public Trust
Public Trust is a New Zealand Crown entity running payroll with Affinity on the fully managed model. Across ANZ, Affinity pays over 500,000 employees for organisations with multi-site operations and high compliance exposure.
Explore fully managed payrollWhich delivery model fits a council or agency?
Most start Supported, because it keeps control in-house while removing the single-point-of-failure risk.
Supported
Your team runs payroll, with our specialists behind them – so knowledge and continuity are not one person deep.
Explore SupportedSaaS
Full in-house control of the platform and its configuration. Suited to larger councils with a deep payroll team.
Explore SaaSFully Managed
We run the cycle end to end – the model Public Trust uses. Suited to agencies consolidating corporate services.
Explore Fully ManagedAlso Worth Reading
What changes day to day, depending on where you sit.
Straight Answer
Every payroll vendor will tell you they're experts in local government
So here is the honest version. Payroll is ubiquitous, and the arithmetic is trivial – rate × units = pay. That equation is identical in a supermarket, a foundry, a law firm, an aged care home and a council depot.
The hard part
The hard part
The easy part
What differs between sectors – the only thing that differs – is how hard it is to establish that rate and those units. A sleepover. A broken shift. A junior's birthday falling mid-cycle. A higher duties day. An Australian RDO drawn down against a banked balance. A New Zealand relevant daily pay calculation on a week of variable hours. That is where payroll gets hard, and it is the only kind of industry expertise worth paying for.
We have done that work in local government many times over, which is why this page can be specific rather than vague. But the engine underneath is not sector-specific, and neither are we – Affinity also runs payroll across logistics and transport, construction and infrastructure, utilities, education, media and hospitality. If your rules are complex and locally regulated, the label on your industry matters less than you would think.
Tell us the rule your system can't hold – whatever sector you're in.
Starting a payroll review?
Two free guides for the two decisions that come before a vendor conversation – whether the change is worth making, and how to judge who can make it.
Build a payroll business case that gets approved
Cost the status quo, value the change, and get to the payback, ROI and NPV a board actually decides on. Includes a savings estimator and a board-ready template.
Choosing a payroll provider
Define what you actually need before you compare a single vendor – then turn it into a scored brief every vendor answers. Includes an RFP template and weighted scoring tool.
Frequently asked questions
We run several enterprise agreements at once. Can Affinity handle that?
Yes, and it is the norm for councils. Indoor and outdoor staff, libraries, childcare, waste, aquatic centres and rangers can each sit under different agreements in a single payroll, with the right interpretation applied per employee rather than per pay run.
What about higher duties, TOIL, nine-day fortnights and long service leave?
Higher duties allowances, on-call and standby, flexitime and time off in lieu accrual and drawdown, RDOs, nine-day fortnights and – in Australia – long service leave including portability scheme reporting are all modelled in configuration and the custom rules layer – not managed on the side in spreadsheets.
Where is our data held, and is Affinity certified?
Data is hosted in Australia and New Zealand, and Affinity is ISO 27001:2022 certified with independent audit. For councils and agencies with data sovereignty obligations, that means onshore hosting is the standard arrangement rather than a special request.
We have to go to tender. Does Affinity fit a procurement process?
Yes. Three clearly separated delivery models with transparent pricing make it straightforward to specify and compare what you are actually buying. There is also a free selection toolkit – an RFP template, a weighted scoring tool and an evaluator's guide – that you can use regardless of which vendors you shortlist.
Can we report cost by department, fund and program?
Yes. Labour cost is attributed as it is incurred and flows through to the general ledger in the format your finance system expects, so budget monitoring and annual report disclosures come from the payroll data rather than a reconciliation exercise.
Do you work with public sector organisations already?
Yes. Public Trust, a New Zealand Crown entity, runs payroll with Affinity on the fully managed model. More broadly, Affinity supports over 500,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand in organisations with multi-site operations and high compliance exposure.
Does Affinity work for New Zealand councils and council-controlled organisations?
Yes. New Zealand councils and CCOs run collective and individual employment agreements rather than enterprise agreements, and Affinity models those the same way it models an Australian EBA – higher duties, on-call and service-based leave entitlements applied per employee. Holidays Act calculations, payday filing, KiwiSaver and ACC are handled natively, with data hosted onshore.
What would payroll look like if it just worked?
One AU/NZ platform that keeps journals clean, catches errors before they land, and gives you back the hours you are spending on checking.