Hospitality ERP Consultant, Australia

Award wages, penalty rates and the real cost of a shift

Most Australian hospitality employees are covered by a modern award that sets minimum rates by classification, along with penalty rates for evenings, weekends and public holidays, casual loading, allowances and overtime. Enterprise agreements apply in some businesses. Wage compliance draws close scrutiny in hospitality, so getting pay right is a governance matter for owners, not only a payroll task.

Interpreting awards is the job of your payroll provider, workplace relations advisor and rostering tool. My job is the data trail. Rostering software records shifts and actual hours, payroll calculates pay and super and reports through Single Touch Payroll, and the ERP receives journals that show wages, penalties, loadings and super by venue and department. I specify that interface so the numbers match payroll to the dollar.

With that in place, managers can compare rostered against actual labor, see penalty costs on Sundays and public holidays, and judge whether trading hours pay for themselves. Labor percentage by department, such as kitchen against front of house, becomes a weekly report rather than a month-end surprise. The general Australian payroll picture is covered on my Australia ERP consultant page.

GST, surcharges and tips at the point of sale

Restaurant and hotel sales generally include GST, but some items sold through a bottle shop, cafe counter or providore may be treated differently, and accommodation can raise its own questions for long stays. The POS applies tax codes product by product, so its setup decides what reaches the BAS. I review that mapping with your accountant and make sure the ERP receives GST separately by outlet and code.

Surcharges are common in Australian hospitality: weekend and public holiday surcharges on the bill, and card payment surcharges in some venues. Both are revenue with GST consequences, and both should appear as distinct lines so they can be analyzed and checked against labor cost and merchant fees. Consumer rules on how surcharges are displayed and set belong to your advisors, not the ERP.

Tips are less dominant than in some markets but still appear on card terminals. Where they are passed to staff, they should land in a clearing account and leave it through payroll. I also design the daily reconciliation of POS takings against merchant settlements, delivery platform payouts and cash banking, because that is where small errors become large ones over a quarter.

Pubs, clubs and venues with many revenue streams

The Australian pub is a business with several departments sharing a building: front bar, bistro, function rooms, bottle shop, accommodation upstairs and often a gaming room. Clubs add membership, and resorts combine rooms, food, activities and retail. Owners need to see each part on its own, because a strong gaming or bottle shop result can mask a bistro that loses money.

I design venue structures with department cost centers, shared cost allocation rules for items like utilities and cleaning, and inventory locations for cellar, bottle shop and kitchen. Liquor is bought from brewers and wholesalers under supply terms that may include rebates, which need tracking per venue so they are not lost in general income.

Gaming deserves special care. Gaming machines and their monitoring systems are regulated by each state or territory, and gaming taxes and levies follow state rules. Those systems stay as they are; the ERP receives only summarized revenue, payouts, taxes and cash movements as agreed with your compliance team. Licensing, responsible service and gaming obligations stay with the people responsible for them. The broader group model is on ERP for hospitality groups.

Regional venues, seasons and long supply lines

Distance shapes Australian hospitality operations. A group with venues in a capital city, a coastal town and the tropical north may face very different delivery schedules, freight costs and supplier choices for each. Some regional sites order weekly in larger quantities, hold more stock and accept substitutions, while city venues receive daily deliveries.

Seasons differ by region as well. Ski resorts trade through winter, the tropical north follows its wet and dry seasons, and coastal holiday towns fill over summer and school holidays. Staffing swings with them, often using casual workers and working holiday makers. I build the season into the design: par levels by period, freight allocated to landed cost, and opening and closing routines for venues that scale down.

A central production kitchen in the city can supply nearby venues with prepared items, while remote sites cook from raw ingredients. The ERP needs both models, with transfer pricing for central supply and recipe costing at venue level. Outlet recipe and food cost control is explained on ERP for restaurants, and groups that also manufacture or bottle products can read my Australian food and beverage ERP page.

Moving off Xero or MYOB and working remotely

Many Australian hospitality groups start with Xero or MYOB for each company, a rostering app, a POS with its own reports and a spreadsheet to combine them. That works until there are several venues, a production kitchen or lenders asking for department results. The next step may be a full ERP or a stronger accounting setup with better integrations, and I help you decide which.

When an ERP is the right answer, I test Zoho, Odoo, ERPNext and Microsoft Dynamics 365 on your scenarios: a public holiday payroll journal, a day of surcharged POS takings, a central kitchen transfer and a BAS reconciliation. Migration covers opening balances per entity, supplier price lists and rebate agreements, stock by location and asset registers for venue fit-outs, planned with data migration support and the integration design for rostering and POS.

The project runs remotely. Workshops are timed for the morning or afternoon overlap with your finance team, venue managers and chefs get recorded walkthroughs to watch before service, and go-live is kept clear of long weekends and major events. Hotel-specific PMS work is covered on ERP for hotels, and more Australian material sits on the Australia hub.