For restaurants, cafés and hotels in Australia
Know if your payroll is compliant in minutes — thanks to AI.
Our AI checks every payslip against the official Fair Work Hospitality Industry Award rates — no spreadsheets, no manual checking, just a clear dollar answer in minutes.
Finding out if — and how much — you owe costs nothing. You decide what happens next.
Based on official Fair Work Pay Guides · Hospitality Industry Award, 2026 rates · Hosted in Australia, data deleted after 30 days
The problem
Most hospitality businesses are already getting this wrong — and the ground has shifted twice in two years.
The Hospitality Industry (General) Award and the Restaurant Industry Award aren’t single numbers you memorise once. Each sets a base rate per classification level, then layers on casual loading, Saturday penalties, Sunday penalties, public holiday penalties that differ by state, junior rates that change by birthday, and an annual wage review that resets most of these numbers every 1 July. A business fully compliant in June can be underpaying by August without anyone touching a pay rate on purpose — the award moved, the payroll system didn’t.
That’s the mechanical problem. The legal and financial problem is bigger, and it changed in two ways most employers haven’t caught up with.
$0M
recovered by the Fair Work Ombudsman in 2024–25 — a national record
0K+
underpaid workers behind that figure, across every industry
0 yrs
how far back Fair Work can pursue an underpayment claim
Fast food, restaurants and cafés have been named an explicit compliance priority for 2025–26 — not a sector that comes up occasionally. In 2026 alone, FWO ran hospitality sweeps in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, recovered $129,000 for 180 workers across small local businesses in Hobart — not large chains, the kind of venue this product is built for — and recovered $194,000 from a Melbourne restaurant group. In Sydney compliance sweeps, a commonly cited figure is that 77% of hospitality businesses inspected were found in breach. The pattern is almost always the same: a decent flat rate, above the weekday minimum, never checked against Saturday, Sunday, public holiday and casual loading once you add them up. It almost never still covers them.
Second, the legal consequence changed on 1 January 2025. Before that date, underpayment was a civil matter — back-pay, and in serious cases, a penalty on top. Since then, intentional wage underpayment is a criminal offence under the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act — up to 10 years’ imprisonment for an individual, fines past $8 million for a body corporate. An honest payroll mistake isn’t itself a crime — but “we didn’t realise” is a materially weaker position than it was two years ago.
A gap in your payroll doesn’t stay private by default. It surfaces when a staff member compares pay slips with a friend at another venue, when a competitor tips off the regulator, or in a routine Fair Work Ombudsman sweep of your area — and by then you’re no longer the one deciding how it gets handled. Finding it yourself, first, changes every part of what happens next. Here’s what’s actually on the table if you don’t:
The back-pay itself — owed to every affected employee, for as long as the error has run.
Civil penalties of up to 3× the underpayment amount, on top of the back-pay.
A Fair Work Ombudsman investigation — your payroll records opened up to scrutiny.
A public enforcement notice, with your business named.
Since January 2025, a criminal referral for intentional underpayment — up to 10 years’ imprisonment and fines running into the millions for larger operators.
Why this happens
This isn’t carelessness. The Award is unusually easy to get wrong despite good intentions.
01
Flat rates hide penalty-rate gaps
A round, above-minimum hourly rate feels safe on an ordinary Tuesday. It stops being safe on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday, when the Award rate isn't the base rate plus a bit — it's the base rate multiplied by a loading that runs from 1.25× to 2.5×. The shortfall is often a few dollars a shift: invisible to a spot-check, real over a year.
02
The Award itself changes every year
The Annual Wage Review resets base and penalty rates every 1 July. Payroll systems don't know this automatically — someone has to update the number, on the date, for shifts after the change, while still paying the old rate correctly for shifts before it. Reports that only check “the current rate” miss exactly this kind of straddling error.
03
Casual loading is easy to drop without noticing
Casual loading applies on top of the base rate, not instead of it — a flat hourly rate that quietly skips it is one of the most common gaps we find, and it compounds across every single shift a casual employee works, not just weekends.
Scope
What we check.
- Base rates by classification level, matched to the correct rate period (2019–2026 historical table)
- Saturday, Sunday and public holiday penalty rates (casual and permanent)
- Casual loading, applied correctly on top of the base rate
- Evening (7pm–midnight) and night work (midnight–7am) loading, Monday to Friday
- Overtime (casual and permanent), once rostered hours pass the weekly threshold — or, for casuals, 12 hours in a single shift
- Junior rates by age, including the rule that junior employees serving alcohol must be paid as adults
- Tool allowance and first aid allowance, calculated per employee from rostered days actually worked
- The equivalent superannuation guarantee shortfall on any confirmed underpayment
How it works
You upload. The engine does the rest.
Upload your payslips and timesheets
PDF, photo, spreadsheet export — whatever you already have. No formatting required, no tax file numbers, ever.
The engine reads and checks every shift
Reading is AI-assisted. The compliance calculation is not — a deterministic rules engine built from the published Award rates, with no AI judgment in deciding what you owe.
You get a report you can actually read
Employee, pay period, source document, exact dollar gap, which rate applies, and the specific correction — in plain English, grouped under what to do first.
Where the underlying data is ambiguous — a missing year on a timesheet, two staff with similar names, an unclear classification — the report says so explicitly rather than guessing in either direction. Every finding carries a confidence level (High, Medium or Low) and a status — confirmed, estimated, or informational — and only confirmed findings ever reach a remediation letter or a regulator-facing document.
The report
Your report doesn’t just saynon-compliant.
For every discrepancy, you get:
- The exact employee and pay period affected
- The exact dollar gap, and which Award rate applies
- The specific correction — ready to action in your next pay run
A dedicated section, “What you need to do now,” groups every action into four categories: fix now, documents to provide, confirm these details, and clarify these entries — so the first thing you read after the headline number is what to actually do about it.
If your payroll comes back clean, the report says exactly that: no discrepancies identified in the data supplied. Not a certification — only the regulator can say that — but a real, documented answer.
Audit extract — casual, Level 2
paid flat $32.00/hr
Five shifts, one employee
−$504.26
The June weekday is 31 cents off — by hand you’d find nothing. Then weekends leak, and on 1 July the award rose 4.75% while the flat rate didn’t: the same Sunday jumps from $45.24 to $47.39, and every shift after the rise leaks more.
Hospitality Award MA000009 · each shift checked at the rate in force on its date · awards.fairwork.gov.au
What it costs
Free to check. You only pay if we find something.
No gap, no charge. If we find one, the price is shown in full before you pay for the complete report.
Check Your Compliance — FreeTrust & data handling
Hosted in Australia, on AWS. Treated like it matters.
Encrypted & confidential
Transferred over an encrypted connection, processed on infrastructure hosted in Australia (AWS), never shared or sold, never used to train any model.
Deleted within 30 days
All files and working data are permanently deleted within 30 days of your results — whether or not you unlock the full report. No account, nothing to remember to close.
Deterministic calculation
AI reads your documents. A rules engine built from the published Award rates decides what you owe — no AI judgment in the number itself.
Your employees are never contacted, and the report identifies them only by whatever label you supplied — initials or staff codes are genuinely sufficient. We never ask for, and you must not upload, tax file numbers.
Who this is for
Built for restaurant, café and hotel employers in Australia with up to 30 employees, engaged under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award or the Restaurant Industry Award. If your business operates under an enterprise agreement (EBA) instead, this isn’t the right tool — we’ll say so plainly rather than take your upload anyway.
See exactly what you’ll get.
A real example of an Award Compliance report — clear compliant/non-compliant status for every payslip, the exact dollar gap, and the specific fix needed. No vague scores, no jargon.
Read the sample reportBuilt on the official Fair Work Pay Guides — not a guess, not a generic calculator.
FAQ
Frequently asked
How long does it take to get my report?
Minutes, not days. Upload your payslips and get your result in the same session — no queue, no human reviewer to wait on.
What exactly do you check, and what don't you?
Base rates, weekend and public holiday penalties, casual loading, evening/night work loading, overtime, junior and allowance rates, and the equivalent super shortfall. A few things aren't covered yet — see the full scope on our FAQ page and in our Terms.
We pay above the award minimum, so we're fine — right?
Not necessarily — the most common assumption behind real underpayment cases. A flat rate that clears the weekday minimum can still fall short once Saturday, Sunday, public holiday or casual loading are added.
Is my data actually confidential?
Yes. Encrypted in transit, processed on infrastructure hosted in Australia (AWS), never shared or sold, deleted within 30 days regardless of whether you unlock the full report. No account, no tax file numbers, no contact with your staff.