A family owned business with a team that works through the night. They came to us with one question. Were the overtime rates on their night work being handled the way the award required?
A case study from a real client. We have changed the details that would identify the business.
Where we started
We did not start with the payroll. We started with the award. We found the award that covered the work and the classification levels that could apply and then we built a worked example: a dummy employee on the business's standard contract, at the business's standard rate, rostered the way the night team was actually rostered.
We ran that example week by week over a two year period and weighed it against the award and the case law. The case we leaned on is the one every employer with salaried staff should now know. In September 2025 the Federal Court held, in the matter brought by the Fair Work Ombudsman against Woolworths and Coles, that a salary can only be set off against award entitlements that fall due in the same pay period. A good week cannot be used to cover a bad one.
The worked example showed the weight of a flat rate and a standard contract against that standard. It showed where a salary covers the week comfortably and where a night shift pattern on top of it starts to leave a gap.
What the question exposed
The pay rate was the question. What it exposed was a set of requirements the business needed in place to answer that question with confidence every week, not once:
- updated operations and rosters, so hours are planned rather than remembered
- education for staff about timekeeping and a record the business can rely on
- updated position descriptions that match the work being done
- a policy suite bolstered to cover additional hours, timekeeping and record keeping
- contract templates actively consistent with the Fair Work Act and the award
- review dates written into every document, so legislative reviews are diarised and treated as a requirement of the business, not an afterthought
What the program looks like
We proposed three stages and the directors took all three.
- Audit and discovery. Award coverage and classification for the whole workforce, a review of payroll and record keeping, a gap analysis of every existing document and confidential interviews with staff about role, workload and supervision.
- Structure, contracts and policies. A structure chart with reporting lines, contracts for each classification with defined ordinary hours and an overtime authorisation requirement, position descriptions and a policy suite from additional hours to social media.
- Systems and strategy. An employee handbook, floor processes for shift open and close, a team leader framework, debtor collection templates, a single indexed document library with a review schedule and a KPI framework the directors review each quarter.
The whole program was quoted as one fixed fee before it began. Ongoing work of this kind is never billed in six minute units.
What the directors said
"We did not realise what our business was capable of or how many systems we already had working in our favour."
If this sounds like your business
If you have salaried staff on night work, weekend shifts or stocktakes and you could not say today whether each pay period covers the award on its own, the first conversation is free.
Gemma-Marie
Basis, checked 24 October 2026. Fair Work Ombudsman v Woolworths Group Limited [2025] FCA 1092 (Perram J, 5 September 2025), on set off of salary against award entitlements within the same pay period. Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) ss 535 and 536 (employee records and pay slips).
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