Record Keeping for Small Businesses

As a small to medium sized business in Australia, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your business and overlook the intricacies of payroll record keeping. However, maintaining accurate records is essential for compliance with Australian law, and failure to do so can result in severe penalties from the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO). 

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In this blog post, we introduce you to Business Records Insights, a record-keeping software solution that can help Australian small businesses manage their payroll records effectively, improve their data quality and avoid penalties.

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Record-keeping requirements for SMEs in Australia

Before we dive into the features and benefits of Business Records Insights, it's essential to understand the record-keeping requirements for small businesses in Australia.

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The Fair Work Act requires businesses to keep records easily accessible for a Fair Work Inspector as well as the records of the last 7 years of operation. The Fair Work Act requires us to keep records of several types of records including; general records, pay records, hours of work records, leave records and super contribution records. 

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Proving compliance with Fair Work can be difficult when records need to be accurate for the last 7 years, with many businesses changing payroll systems every few years, hence why it is extremely important to do as much as possible to keep complete and accurate records. 

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Failure to keep accurate payroll records can result in hefty fines and penalties from the FWO. Additionally, the FWO may conduct an audit of your business's records, which can be a time-consuming, expensive and anxiety-inducing process.

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Features and benefits of Business Records Insights

Business Records Insights is a powerful tool that helps small businesses in Australia improve their compliance with Fair Work laws. 

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Business Records Insights identifies and helps you improve data quality issues that may stop you from being able to prove you are compliant. It provides tailored insights that enhance your data quality score and enables you to investigate why and how you're not collecting the necessary data. The software also educates you on how data quality affects compliance and how to fix those issues to improve your data quality. 

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Some instances of payroll data quality flags that the software produces are duplicate payments, unusual amounts of hours, as well as missing shifts and break start and finish times. You can dive deeper into your insights and even download and share them with other team members to solve these issues. This helps you gain clarity on how errors in record keeping affect your compliance and pay accuracy more broadly.

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For more information, check out our FAQs or take a product tour.

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Use cases of Business Records Insights

Australian SMEs across various industries — including retail, hospitality and aged care — can leverage software like this to improve the quality of the data they collect and give themselves the best chance possible to pay employees correctly. 

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For example, a small restaurant can use the software to identify inconsistencies in their data, where an employee's timesheet says 9 hours worked but a pay record says 8. Another use case is to identify where data may be missing, in that for some shifts no meal break was recorded when an employee was entitled to one. Both are examples of poor record keeping.

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How Business Records Insights works

How does Business Records Insights empower SMEs to manage accurate and up-to-date records and maintain compliance with the law? It starts by collecting and analysing data from various sources to provide tailored suggestions and insights to improve data quality and compliance.

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It assesses the quality of your data, looking for missing or invalid values in your business records and evaluating whether valid values are plausible and accurate. This analysis generates a "Data Quality Score" that provides a snapshot of your compliance status.

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If there are any issues with your data quality score, you are provided with unique, tailored suggestions to improve the quality of the payroll data you are collecting. These suggestions can help you get to where your record-keeping issues originate, so you can optimise your processes and safeguard future data.

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Leveraging tailored recommendations and improving your payroll data quality allow you to prove your compliance and boost your payroll confidence effortlessly. You gain a robust understanding of how your data quality impacts compliance. 

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About Business Records Insights and PaidRight

Business Records Insights is a product of PaidRight, an Australian-based company specialising in payroll and compliance solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. We aim to help companies restore trust between employees and employers by ensuring accurate and compliant payroll. 

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PaidRight was founded as a joint venture between PwC Australia and CSIRO's Data61 with the aim of creating and commercialising an innovative payroll technology system that provides confidence to businesses that they are paying their employees correctly, and they can prove it. 

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The Business Records Insights report aims to improve the payroll data quality of the business. What we have found is that a significant reason that businesses are unable to prove they are paying their employees correctly is because the data they have collected is not complete, accurate or valid. 

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Collecting the right data can be a challenge for many businesses as system error, human error and the dynamic nature of work prevents us all from having perfect payroll data. However, having complete business records will put you in the best position to be able to prove compliance to Fair Work. 

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At PaidRight, we believe that businesses invest too much time and resources into getting payroll right, and it shouldn't have to be a burden. By providing businesses with tailored insights to improve their payroll data and gaps and outliers in their businesses records, they can make the necessary changes to their systems so they are collecting all the data they need to prove compliance and pay employees accurately. 

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Achieve compliance with confidence: Schedule a Business Records Insights demo now

Business Records Insights is the perfect solution for small businesses in Australia looking to maintain compliance and avoid penalties from Fair Work. By offering tailored data quality insights, the software ensures that your payroll data is of the highest quality, improving your compliance and giving you peace of mind.

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Take advantage of the benefits. Sign up for a demo today and experience firsthand how Business Records Insights can help you manage your records effectively and achieve compliance with ease.

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So, what are you waiting for? Book your demo now.

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