Penalty Rate Changes - Will You Be Ready

The Federal Government of Australia has moved to make changes to the penalty rates of employees who work on Sunday’s and Public Holidays. How this is going to affect small businesses who employ staff on these periods, and how it will affect the employees themselves is yet to be seen, with many different opinions from both sides of the debate. Industry experts have weighed in on the topic with arguments that more staff can work on these days now that businesses will be likely to spend more for each shift, whereas the flip-side is that employees who relied on that money around studies will now be earning less or have to work more. Other arguments are coming from customers of these businesses themselves asking if that means the surcharges on Public Holidays will now be defunct, or if they are adding a surcharge, how can we know as consumers they are paying their staff the old penalty rates, which is the surcharge is there to cover?

There’s going to be a lot of confusion around this change as it is implemented and the questions will come from both staff and business operators on how best to move forward. If you are a business owner, you need to work out which is the best way to move forward and to pay your staff by rostering more effectively. A good rostering system is essential to being able to provide the service that you want to give, and your customers expect. How can you do that when you don’t know what’s going to happen? The short answer is to forecast. You probably already do this to an extent, but what data do you use and how often?

Idealpos has several options tailored to meet these requirements to help you manage just this problem. We have several integrations with Employee Attendance, Forecast Rostering and Control to help gather the data that is required. Our integration with Tanda can help, being our latest addition which we’re excited to be releasing very soon. We contacted Tanda to get their take on the penalty rates change and what benefits our integration can provide to business owners who are trying to get their head around it all. Here’s what they had to say:

"The decision by The Fair Work Commission to change Sunday and Public Holidays penalty rates will bring about significant changes for businesses operating within the Hospitality, Retail and Fast Food industries. For starters businesses will need to update their Award rates to match the penalty rate changes for all staff, re-think how they roster staff across these days, and how they manage their labour costs going forward as a result.

For businesses using Tanda, these Award rate updates will happen automatically in Tanda, and will be pushed across straight into your payroll system. Now that you know you’re compliant and paying staff correctly in line with the new Fair Work decision, you can focus on getting better control of your labour costs.

Integrating Tanda and Idealpos means that you can import Sales data straight into Tanda. You’ll be able to see your busiest sales time, and then roster your staff according to demand. In addition to this, Tanda’s Award Engine will cost your roster as you’re building it (to match your sales data), so that you know ahead of time how much it’ll cost you. Using sales data to more efficiently roster staff, gives you the ability to make smarter decisions for productivity and profitability. It also means that you can be future focused when making decisions about your business as a whole."

We understand that this is a big change in how a business operates and as we service both Hospitality and Retail sectors, we want to help you as much as we can. For more information what we can do, contact us, or get in touch with Tanda who are more than happy to help with information on improving your business.