PayQuery

1Start the project

Every matter gets its own reference — everything below attaches to it

Give the matter a reference (a client name, a file number — whatever your firm already uses) and confirm it. This creates the matter's private workspace: nothing you load in later steps is visible outside it, and nothing is priced until you've told PayQuery which award and state apply.

2Establish the pay rules

The rule the whole platform runs on: nothing prices on an unverified rate

Copy a ready-made modern award into your firm's rule set, or upload an enterprise agreement for extraction. Either way, every rate starts unverified — a draft — and stays that way until a person on your team reviews and approves it against the source document. Unverified rules can be drafted and previewed, but they cannot price a real matter. This is deliberate: the platform does not let convenience quietly become liability.

If a side agreement or a documented practice departs from the award — an over-award rate, a travel-time arrangement agreed by email — record it here as a clause override, with your rationale and (if you've stored one in Step 3) the exhibit it's anchored to.

Watch: how a rate goes from loaded to priceable — fork, verify, approve (27s) ↗

3Load the evidence

People first, then their shifts, then what they were actually paid

Upload the employee master first — every timesheet row is matched against it, and a shift for someone not yet on the master is refused rather than guessed. Then the timesheets: PayQuery profiles the file, shows you what would be kept versus rejected, and only commits the data on your explicit confirmation — three separate steps between a file landing on your desk and it becoming part of the record. Payslips are optional but valuable: with them loaded, PayQuery can flag coverage gaps (someone paid with no matching timesheet, or vice versa).

Side-agreement documents — the email that authorised a rate, a signed letter — belong here too, as exhibits. Each is hashed at upload and the hash never changes; a ruling that cites one is citing a specific, verifiable file, not just a sentence.

4Map job classifications

Match the client's job titles to the award's classification levels

Real timesheets rarely use the award's own language — "Team Lead" isn't a classification code. This step is where you tell PayQuery which award level each job title actually corresponds to, once, for the whole matter.

This is also where you record and later revise a rule change — see the pay-rules section above for the walkthrough on editing without overwriting.

Watch: how to author, then edit or replace, a pay rule (44s) ↗

5Calculate

Every shift, priced against the rules in force on its date

Press run and PayQuery prices every committed shift — penalties, overtime, allowances, junior rates that step up as someone turns 18, wage-year boundaries crossed correctly — shift by shift, each with the clause behind it. Large files run in the background with a live progress bar; the run cannot time out.

Working on an insolvency matter? Set an as-at date here — the appointment date — and everything after it is held out of the totals and named separately, so the position is exactly what was owed up to that day, not a day later.

6Resolve judgement calls

Where the data was ambiguous, PayQuery asked rather than assumed

Anything the engine couldn't determine on its own — an assumed classification, a questionable break, a shift that might be two split periods rather than one — is collected here for you to confirm or correct. Nothing gets buried in a warning log; it's a queue you clear.

7Reconcile

Entitled versus actually paid, per employee

If payslips were loaded in Step 3, this is where entitled and paid meet: the variance, per person, per pay period — the number the whole engagement exists to produce.

8Report

The client-facing document, and — for insolvency matters — the statutory schedule

Generate the forensic summary: findings, methodology, and every figure traceable back to its clause. Client-facing exports render only from a frozen, immutable run — a run built on unapproved rules can't quietly become a clean report.

For external administrations, this step also builds the Employee Entitlements Schedule: the as-at wage position merged with NES statutory redundancy and notice, per employee, on one page — priced off the same dated rates as the wage figures, so the two sides can never quietly disagree.

9Remediate

Track what's owed through to payment

The remediation register tracks each payment against the schedule until it's closed out. When you're ready to actually pay people, PayQuery can build a bank-ready direct entry (ABA) file from the reviewed amounts — anyone missing bank details is excluded from the file and named, never silently dropped.