TempusThe Sector Where Payroll Is Genuinely Hard
Sleepovers, disturbed nights, funded hours and staff moving between sites. The rules are not especially complicated, but they interact in ways most payroll setups rarely account for.
Marralomeda
Not every care provider clocks staff on and off a wall. Marralomeda's story is the same sector, a different starting point.
“Absolutely, I would wholeheartedly recommend them… fantastic support, really great team — everyone we've dealt with on the team has been really easy to work with.
Viniece DoddsMarralomeda Charitable Trust Community Leader
Where Care Payroll Usually Drifts
Errors in this sector rarely show up as an obviously wrong number. They show up as a slow drift that only becomes visible when someone leaves, or when a balance is finally checked properly.
Sleepover time is work time. Someone required to be at a workplace and available to respond is working, so those hours count when you test whether they have been paid the minimum wage. A flat allowance is fine — plenty of agreements use one — but total pay divided by total hours still has to clear the minimum for the period.
Disturbed nights are a capture problem. Not a calculation one. If active time is written on a paper sheet in a house and typed up days later, it will be wrong sometimes, and usually wrong in the same direction. Recording it at the point it happens fixes most of it before it reaches the pay run.
Leave is where it gets expensive. Annual holidays are paid at the greater of ordinary weekly pay and average weekly earnings, and gross earnings includes sleepover payments. A system computing leave from the base rate alone underpays every holiday that person takes, quietly, for as long as it runs.
Alternative holidays, sick leave and bereavement leave work on a days basis, paid using relevant daily pay or average daily pay. If a sleepover has lifted someone's weekly earnings, the same uplift does not automatically flow through to these. The unit is different, so the calculation is different.
What Is Changing in 2028
The Employment Leave Act 2026 replaces the Holidays Act on 6 August 2028. For this sector the change is mostly about how hours are classified.
Holidays Act 2003
- Annual holidays accrue as four weeks on each anniversary.
- Leave types are paid on different bases, which is where most errors start.
- Sleepovers count toward gross earnings for the weekly comparison.
Employment Leave Act 2026
- Annual and sick leave accrue in hours from an employee's first day.
- One hourly leave pay rate covers every leave type, removing the comparison.
- Hours are split into standard, additional and casual, and that split matters here.
Sleepovers and overnight work do not disappear under either framework. What changes is how the hours behind them are classified, which is why the classification is worth getting right before 2028 rather than after.
A Conversation About Your Actual Pay Run
Bring a recent pay run and we will tell you what we see, including anything that looks like it needs a closer look.