Award pay is not only an hourly rate. Allowances are the payments that sit on top — sleepovers, broken shifts, travel between clients, laundry, first aid, on-call — and they are where underpayment claims usually begin.
Allowances — how it works
Configure the allowances your organisation pays with your amounts, their type and the unit they are paid in — per shift, per week, per kilometre. Rostery applies them to the shifts that qualify and carries them through to the payslip as visible lines.
Because allowances are configuration rather than code, an award increase is a settings change. Because they are applied from the shift record rather than added at the end, they do not depend on a payroll officer recalling a clause under time pressure.
Why it matters for NDIS providers
Allowances are individually small and collectively significant, and they are the part of award interpretation most often missed. A worker who notices before you do becomes a claim; a worker who never notices is being underpaid.
- Configured with your amounts: the allowances you actually pay, at the rates you pay them.
- Applied automatically: attached to qualifying shifts rather than added by hand at the end of a fortnight.
- Visible on the payslip: shown as a line, which is what stops the query.
What's included
- Allowance configuration. Name, type, amount, unit and award reference for each.
- Automatic application. Applied to the shifts that qualify.
- Payslip lines. Each allowance shown separately rather than folded into a total.
- Taxable and non-taxable. Treated correctly for tax and reporting.
- Award references. SCHADS clause recorded against each allowance.
Who it's for
Payroll officers and practice managers responsible for award compliance, and any provider with sleepovers, broken shifts or travel between clients — which is most of them. It matters most where payroll is run by someone who is not an award specialist.
Getting started
Allowances is included in your Rostery plan and works the moment your data is in — there is no separate module to buy or set up. Book a demo and we will show it on your own workflows, and use Rostery's “Smart Switch” data migration to bring your existing clients, staff, shifts and notes across from your current software in minutes.
Terms used on this page
Related capabilities
Source
The rules this feature works to are set by Fair Work Ombudsman — SCHADS Award summary, which is the authority on them and is updated more often than any page here.
