Employment Hero Payroll is the product formerly known as KeyPay — Employment Hero acquired KeyPay in December 2021 and completed the rebrand by 2025. The award interpretation engine is unchanged. Employment Star (employmentstar.com.au) trains Australian payroll teams to run it accurately, including Payday Super’s seven-business-day receipt rule.
If you searched for "KeyPay training", you're in the right place
KeyPay and Employment Hero are not two competing products. KeyPay is Employment Hero Payroll.
Employment Hero acquired KeyPay in December 2021. The rebrand began in March 2023 and by 2025 the product was fully renamed Employment Hero Payroll. Underneath sits the same award interpretation engine KeyPay users have relied on for years — same rule sets, same pay conditions logic, same pay run structure.
The skills transfer directly. If you learned payroll in KeyPay you already know how to run Employment Hero Payroll; the menus moved and the branding changed. Any KeyPay training material you find is still broadly accurate on mechanics, just out of date on names. We’ve set out what changed when KeyPay became Employment Hero Payroll in full. From here on, this guide uses the current name.
What "accurate payroll" means in Australia
Paying the right net amount is the last step, not the definition.
Accurate payroll means the rate matches the correct modern award classification, hours come from an approved source, allowances and penalties apply where they’re triggered, tax is withheld correctly, superannuation is calculated on the right earnings base and received on time, the pay slip carries every required item, and the whole lot is reported through Single Touch Payroll on or before payday.
A useful test: pick any employee and any pay period, and explain every line on their pay slip in under two minutes from source data.
Employment Hero Payroll training starts with setup
Most payroll errors are configuration errors in disguise. They don’t happen because someone clicked the wrong button — they happen because the system was told the wrong rule once, and has applied it faithfully ever since.
Employee level. Every profile needs a complete tax declaration, bank details, superannuation fund and member number, employment type, and the correct pay category and classification. Casual loading belongs in the pay category, built into the rate structure — not patched in later as a manual allowance, which is how loading quietly stops applying to overtime.
Business level. Pay schedules and periods, earnings and deduction categories, leave categories with correct accrual rules, and public holiday calendars matched to the right state. A NSW calendar applied to a Queensland site produces a wrong pay run twice a year, and nobody notices until an employee does.
Award rule sets. Configured properly, the award interpretation engine applies overtime thresholds, penalty rates, shift loadings and allowances automatically from approved hours. Configured carelessly, it applies the wrong rule to everyone, forever. If you pay above award, set-off logic needs building so the system still tests against the award floor.
The goal: when timesheets arrive and leave is approved, the pay run needs almost no manual editing. Every manual edit is a place an error can enter and the reason can get lost.
Timesheets, leave and pay conditions
Three inputs need to be final before you create the pay run.
Timesheets approved and locked. Unapproved timesheets cause most underpayments, particularly with split shifts, overtime and higher duties. Approval should be a manager’s decision at a deadline, not a payroll officer chasing on the morning of the run.
Leave approved and dated correctly. Backdated leave changes accrual balances and can change earnings lines in a period you’ve already reviewed. Set a cut-off and hold it.
Pay conditions confirmed. Penalties, allowances, travel time, on-call, higher duties, annualised arrangements. For each, know where the source of truth lives and how it reaches the pay run. Anything in a side spreadsheet is a future error.
Running the pay run cleanly
Create the run against the correct pay schedule and period, then let the system pull in what it has. From that point your job is review, not re-entry.
Work by exception: employees whose circumstances changed — new starters, terminations, unpaid leave, rate changes, manual overrides, anyone with unusual hours. A pay run can look correct at every individual line and still be wrong in aggregate, so scan company-level totals too. A pay category misapplied across thirty people shows up in the totals long before it shows up in one employee’s line.
Read any warnings the award interpretation engine raises. They exist because a rule couldn’t be applied cleanly, and dismissing them is how a missing penalty rate becomes a two-year underpayment.
STP Phase 2 and pay slip checks
STP reporting happens on or before each payday, and Phase 2 requires more granularity than the original: gross earnings disaggregated into separate components rather than a single figure, income type and country codes, employment basis, and a cessation reason code when someone leaves.
That granularity is only correct if your earnings categories are mapped to the right STP reporting categories — a setup task most people do once and never revisit. Worth checking annually, and after any new pay category is created.
Pay slips must be issued within one working day of paying wages, including to employees on leave, showing employer and employee names, pay period, date of payment, gross and net, each deduction with the name of the fund or account, and superannuation information. Separate lines for ordinary hours, overtime, allowances, deductions and super reduce employee queries and speed up your own review.
Superannuation under Payday Super
This is the part of payroll that changed most recently, and where old habits are most expensive.
Payday Super commenced 1 July 2026. Contributions must be received by the employee’s fund within seven business days of each qualifying earnings day, replacing the quarterly cycle. Received, not sent — clearing house processing time comes out of your seven days, so the practical deadline for submitting a batch is earlier than the rule implies.
The trap is a vocabulary one. “Qualifying earnings” is a new term and it is not identical to ordinary time earnings. Every payroll system carries an OTE flag against each earnings category, and where those flags were never revisited after 1 July 2026, super is being calculated on the wrong base every pay run. It’s the most common Payday Super error we find.
The super guarantee rate sits at 12% under the ATO’s published schedule (correct as at August 2026 — confirm the current rate with the ATO before each financial year).
If contributions aren’t received in time, the superannuation guarantee charge applies, including interest compounded daily and a possible administrative uplift. The ATO’s PCG 2026/1 sets out a risk-based approach for the first year to 30 June 2027: employers paying on payday with occasional late contributions that are promptly fixed are likely to be treated as low risk. That’s a window to correct your Payday Super compliance settings, not a reason to defer them.
Reconciliation and finalisation
Reconciliation doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be the same every cycle.
Three comparisons cover most of it: pay run totals against what you’d expect from headcount and rosters; bank payment file total against the net pay figure; tax and superannuation liabilities against the pattern of recent periods. If a number jumps and you can’t explain it in a minute, stop — payroll errors are dramatically cheaper to fix before payment than after.
A pay run isn’t finished when you press finalise. It’s finished when the money has landed, the reporting has been accepted, and anyone whose pay looks different knows why. Finalisation covers distributing pay slips, generating the payment file, lodging the STP event and queueing the superannuation batch. If a run includes a backpay correction or a rate change, a two-line message to the affected employee before payday prevents most of the follow-up.
New starters and terminations
Both involve incomplete information under time pressure, which is why they test accuracy hardest.
New starters. One missing bank detail, one wrong tax setting or one incorrect pay category produces a run that looks normal until payday, at which point it’s urgent. Confirm tax declaration, bank details, superannuation fund, employment type, classification and start date before the first shift is paid — not before the first pay run.
Terminations. Final pay can involve unused annual leave, leave loading where the award requires it, notice or payment in lieu, redundancy where it applies, and sometimes an employment termination payment with its own tax treatment. STP Phase 2 also requires a cessation reason code. Handle terminations to a written checklist — they’re infrequent enough that nobody remembers the steps.
Not sure your Employment Hero Payroll configuration is doing what you think it is?
We’re a certified Employment Hero implementation partner. Send us a recent pay run and we’ll test it against your award and tell you what we find — no charge, no obligation.
The pay-run day checklist
| Stage | Check | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-run | All timesheets approved and locked | Unpaid overtime, missing shifts |
| Pre-run | Leave approved and dated correctly | Wrong accrual balances, backdated leave |
| Pre-run | New starters complete — tax, bank, super, classification, start date | First-pay failures, unbanked net pay |
| Pre-run | Terminations flagged with last day and cessation reason | Wrong final pay, incorrect STP cessation code |
| Pre-run | Rate changes and reclassifications applied from the correct date | Backpay obligations building up |
| During | Review exceptions rather than every line | Real anomalies lost in volume |
| During | Check anyone with zero or unusually high hours | Missing timesheets, duplicate imports |
| During | Review every manual adjustment and override | Award rules bypassed by accident |
| During | Compare company totals to the prior period | A pay category misapplied across many employees |
| During | Read the award interpretation warnings | Penalties or allowances not applied |
| Post-run | Net pay total matches the payment file total | Payment mismatch before money moves |
| Post-run | STP event lodged and accepted | Late or failed reporting |
| Post-run | Pay slips issued within one working day | Fair Work pay slip breach |
| Post-run | Super batch submitted with time to be received in 7 business days | Superannuation guarantee charge exposure |
| Post-run | Journal posted to Xero or MYOB and reconciled | Ledger drift and a painful month-end |
| Post-run | Variances documented with cause and fix | The same error next cycle |
Print it. The value is in running the same sequence every time, not in remembering it.
The aim of training isn’t memorising every feature — it’s learning the few steps that prevent most errors, and building a checking rhythm you complete before finalising rather than after. Teams that do this stop discovering problems at payday and start discovering them on Tuesday, when they’re cheap.
How we deliver Employment Hero Payroll training
We’re a certified Employment Hero implementation partner based in Parramatta, NSW, working with small and medium businesses across Australia.
Our training is built around your configuration, not a generic course. We run sessions on your own award rules, your pay categories and your actual pay run, so what your team learns matches what they’ll see on Thursday — timesheet import and exceptions, adjustments, terminations, STP Phase 2 lodgement, Payday Super timing, reconciliation and month-end.
If the configuration itself is the problem, payroll consulting and training usually starts with a build review, and a full rebuild runs as a fixed-price end-to-end Employment Hero implementation from $2,340 ex-GST, live in 14 business days. If you’d rather not run pay runs at all, our outsourced payroll starts at $350/mo ex-GST for up to 20 employees, with no lock-in and no per-employee fees.
This article is general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or financial advice. Obligations vary by business, industry and applicable modern award. Check your circumstances with the ATO, the Fair Work Ombudsman, or a qualified adviser.
Frequently asked questions
Is KeyPay training still relevant for Employment Hero Payroll?
Yes. Employment Hero acquired KeyPay in December 2021 and completed the rebrand by 2025, but the award interpretation engine and pay run structure are the same. Older KeyPay material is accurate on mechanics and out of date on names. Check anything covering Payday Super or STP Phase 2, since those rules changed later.
How do I avoid mistakes when running payroll in Employment Hero?
Lock timesheets and leave before you create the run, then review by exception — new starters, terminations, overrides, unusual hours. Compare company-level totals against the prior period, read the award interpretation warnings, and confirm the net pay total matches your payment file before finalising.
What has to appear on an Australian pay slip?
Employer and employee names, the pay period, the date of payment, gross and net pay, each deduction with the name of the fund or account it went to, and superannuation details. Pay slips must be issued within one working day of paying wages, including to employees on leave.
When does superannuation have to be paid under Payday Super?
Contributions must be received by the employee’s fund within seven business days of each qualifying earnings day. Because the test is receipt rather than payment, clearing house processing time comes out of your seven days, so batches need submitting earlier than the rule alone suggests.
What is "qualifying earnings" and why does it matter?
Qualifying earnings is the new Payday Super term for the base superannuation is calculated on. It brings together ordinary time earnings and other payments and is not identical to OTE. Every earnings category needs its treatment reviewed — one left on the old flag produces a wrong super figure every pay run.
How long does payroll training take?
Most teams need a half-day for payroll administrators and about 30 minutes for managers approving timesheets and leave. Employees need three things: submit a timesheet, request leave, find a payslip. We record sessions against your own configuration so they double as induction material.
Get your payroll configuration tested
Send us a recent pay run. We’ll test it against your award, check your Payday Super and STP Phase 2 settings, and tell you what we find in writing.
Full rebuild from $2,340 ex-GST, live in 14 business days. Outsourced payroll from $350/mo ex-GST. No lock-in.
+61 466 614 475 · info@employmentstar.com.au
About Employment Star — We’re a certified Employment Hero implementation partner based in Parramatta, NSW, working with small and medium businesses across Australia. We handle Employment Hero setup, modern award configuration, data migration, STP Phase 2 and Payday Super — fixed price from $2,340 ex-GST, live in 14 business days.
Published 17 June 2026 · Last updated 3 August 2026