For Aged Care, Disability & Community
Every hour spent fixing payroll is an hour not spent on the people you serve
Community services, aged care and disability payroll is among the hardest on either side of the Tasman. Your back office is usually the smallest.
Sleepovers, broken shifts, travel between clients, 24-hour care, cancellation provisions, pay equity levels – all of it interpreted from the award, every pay, without your team doing it by hand.
Affinity's aged care payroll software also covers community services and disability providers across Australia and New Zealand, interpreting SCHADS, the Aged Care Award and New Zealand collective agreements automatically – sleepovers, broken shifts, travel time and pay equity levels. Supported and fully managed delivery means award complexity no longer sits with two people.
Who This Is For
This is for community services, aged care and disability providers in Australia and New Zealand – organisations running fragmented part-time and casual hours across many sites, under awards written by people who have never had to run them through a payroll system.
If your payroll officer is also your award interpreter, this page is for you.
Your mission isn't payroll.
But payroll can undo it.
The challenge
- • SCHADS broken shifts, sleepovers and 24-hour care shifts
- • Travel time and kilometre allowances between clients
- • Client cancellation, on-call and recall provisions
- • Aged care work value increases applied retrospectively
The impact
- • Funding is fixed, so a payroll error is a service cut
- • Interpretation mistakes surface as underpayment headlines
- • Two or three people carry the whole compliance risk
- • Boards and funders want assurance you can't easily evidence
A better way
You exist to deliver care, not to run an award interpretation department. Money spent correcting payroll is money that never reaches the people you're funded to support.
The Rules You Actually Run
Not a generic leave engine with a care-sector label on it.
NDIS & Disability
SCHADS (MA000100), plus MA000018 aged care and the Nurses Award where it applies
Sleepovers
Broken shifts, 24-hour care and minimum engagement handled in interpretation
Travel & km
Time between clients and vehicle allowances paid from actual worked time
AU & NZ
Holidays Act and Care and Support Worker pay equity levels, natively
We don't ask you to configure SCHADS. We ask for the document.
Most payroll systems solve award complexity with increasingly elaborate configuration screens, then quietly hand the hard provisions back to your payroll officer. Affinity parses your actual award, enterprise agreement, New Zealand collective agreement and individual employment contracts into precise interpretation logic.
- Sleepovers, broken shifts and 24-hour care paid from actual worked time
- Travel time, kilometre allowances, on-call, recall and cancellation
- Retrospective work value increases recalculated date-effectively, not as a separate back-pay project
- A custom rules layer for the genuinely non-standard clauses other systems return to you
One support worker, one week
Complexity shouldn't scale with your back office
Social services organisations rarely have the payroll headcount their award complexity deserves. That is why so many choose a model where Affinity's team runs the cycle, or runs it alongside yours – so the risk doesn't sit with two people and a spreadsheet.
- Fully Managed – we run the pay cycle end to end
- Supported – your team runs it, with our specialists behind them
- Continuity when your payroll officer is on leave, or leaves
- Move between models as your team changes
Heritage Lifecare
3,000
people supported
42
sites
1
managed payroll
One of New Zealand's largest residential aged-care providers runs on Affinity's fully managed model, from Whangārei to Invercargill.
Read the case studyCost by program, site and funding stream – as it happens
Acquittal, board reporting, NDIS price limits in Australia and contracted funding rates in New Zealand all need the same thing: the true cost of a shift, attributed correctly, before someone rebuilds it in a spreadsheet at month end.
- Labour cost split by program, site, funding stream and cost centre at the point of pay
- Scheduled vs actual vs budget, visible before the pay run
- True shift cost including loadings, travel, allowances and on-costs
- Board and funder reporting from payroll data, not a reconciliation
Cost attribution, one fortnight
Illustrative view of how labour cost is attributed across programs and funding streams.
Your path to payroll your board can trust
Bring us your awards and agreements
We parse the actual documents – SCHADS, aged care, your enterprise agreement – and show you what interpretation looks like against your real rosters.
Prove value in two cycles
Run parallel against your current system. See the manual adjustments disappear before you commit to anything.
Give the risk somewhere to sit
Choose how much of the cycle your team runs, and stop carrying award interpretation risk on two people's shoulders.
What's at risk?
Without Affinity
- Award interpretation risk carried by two or three people
- Underpayment exposure compounding every fortnight
- Funding spent correcting pay instead of delivering service
- Cost by program rebuilt manually at month end
- No continuity when your payroll officer is away
With Affinity
- SCHADS and aged care provisions interpreted every pay
- Errors surfaced before pay day, not after an audit
- More of your funding reaching frontline service
- Program and funding-stream cost available on demand
- A specialist team behind your payroll, not just software
We know what you're thinking
You are spending grant and funding money, under scrutiny, on a system change you did not ask for. We are not going to pretend that is a small decision. Here's the honest answer to the five things we hear most:
"We can't justify enterprise payroll on our funding."
Then justify it on the correction effort instead. Count the hours your team spends manually adjusting sleepovers, travel and broken shifts each fortnight, plus what a single back-pay exercise costs. That is the number that matters, and it is usually the argument that wins with a board.
"Our rosters are driven by client need, not shift patterns."
That is exactly why interpretation has to run off actual worked time rather than a planned roster. Cancellations, recalls, extended shifts and unplanned travel are the normal case here, not the exception – and they are handled as such.
"We've been told SCHADS can't really be automated."
By systems that configure awards through screens, that is close to true. Affinity starts from your award and agreement documents and models the provisions directly, with a custom rules layer for whatever remains genuinely non-standard.
"Our board needs assurance before we change anything."
Give them evidence rather than promises. We run parallel cycles against your current payroll and show matched results before go-live. Affinity is ISO 27001:2022 certified with data hosted in Australia and New Zealand.
"We don't have anyone to run an implementation."
Most of the providers we work with didn't either. That is what the Supported and Fully Managed models exist for – we do the heavy lifting while your team keeps paying people.
Explore Fully Managed payrollImagine a pay run nobody dreads
Picture this: the fortnight closes and there is no spreadsheet of sleepover corrections waiting. Travel time is already on the payslip. The two flagged items are explained, and both are genuine.
Your finance lead pulls cost by program without asking anyone. Your board paper is a report, not a project. And the hours your team used to spend interpreting an award are going into the service you actually exist to deliver.
That's not a dream. That's Affinity.
Trusted in care and community services
"The Affinity system increased our compliance and best practice without needing to implement an additional HRIS immediately."– Margaret Crozier, General Manager People and Culture, Heritage Lifecare
Heritage Lifecare supports over 3,000 people across 42 sites, from Whangārei to Invercargill, on Affinity's fully managed payroll.
Read the Heritage Lifecare storyWhich delivery model fits a social services provider?
High complexity and a lean back office usually points one way – but the choice stays yours.
Fully Managed
Our team runs the pay cycle end to end. Award interpretation risk stops being yours to absorb.
Explore Fully ManagedSupported
Your team runs payroll, with our specialists behind them for the complex cases and the busy weeks.
Explore SupportedSaaS
You run it. Suited to larger providers with an established in-house payroll team.
Explore SaaSAlso Worth Reading
What changes day to day, depending on where you sit.
Straight Answer
Every payroll vendor will tell you they're experts in social services
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 social services 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
Does Affinity interpret SCHADS (MA000100)?
Yes – including the provisions most systems hand back to payroll. Broken shifts, sleepovers, 24-hour care shifts, client cancellation, travel time between clients and kilometre allowances, on-call and recall are all interpreted from actual worked time against the award, rather than corrected manually after the fact.
What about the Aged Care Award and the work value increases?
The Aged Care Award (MA000018), the Nurses Award where it applies, and the staged work value increases are all handled. Where a change is retrospective, Affinity's date-effective processing recalculates from the correct date rather than requiring a separate back-pay exercise.
Can we see labour cost by program, site and funding stream?
Yes. Costing attributes labour to program, site, funding stream and cost centre as it is incurred, which is what acquittal and board reporting actually need. Reporting then presents it without a month-end spreadsheet rebuild.
We're an NDIS provider. Does Affinity help with price limits?
Affinity does not set your pricing, but it does give you the number you need to manage against it: the true cost of the shift, including loadings, travel, allowances and on-costs, visible before the pay run rather than after. That is the figure that tells you whether a service is being delivered within an NDIS price limit in Australia, or a contracted funding rate in New Zealand.
We have a small back office and complex awards. What delivery model suits us?
This is the most common reason social services organisations choose Fully Managed or Supported payroll – Affinity's team runs the cycle or works alongside yours, so award complexity does not have to be absorbed by two or three people internally. Heritage Lifecare runs 3,000 staff across 42 sites on the fully managed model.
Does Affinity handle New Zealand care and support work?
Yes. The Holidays Act, its average daily pay and relevant daily pay calculations, and Care and Support Worker pay equity levels are all handled natively, alongside payday filing, KiwiSaver and ACC.
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.