Micropower Payroll Classic discontinued: discussing the options

What happened

Micropower advised clients that it would discontinue the Payroll Classic program, on the basis that the program required substantial updates to remain aligned with ATO legislation. Micropower recommended that Classic Payroll users migrate to an alternative payroll platform.

The questions that decide your answer

There is no single correct replacement. For a club, the choice turns on how payroll connects to everything around it:

• Do you currently use Micropower Rostering? If not, how is rostering done now, and is that process actually sufficient?

• Do you use PeopleKey or a similar clock-in system for time tracking?

• Are you using Micropower for financials, and do you need integration between financials and membership software?

• How many employees do you need to run payroll for?

Those four answers narrow the field quickly, and getting them wrong is expensive — payroll migrations are difficult to reverse once a financial year has started.

Why rostering is the deciding factor

Rostering that is easily manageable, visible to staff, and dynamic enough to absorb the inevitable mid-week changes is critical to the smooth operation of any club. It is also where most of the administrative hours actually go.

Plenty of products do payroll well. Plenty do rostering well. Few integrate both properly, and for a club running variable shifts across bar, gaming, kitchen and greens, that integration is where the time saving lives.

Where rostering is an area that needs improvement anyway, treating this as a combined rostering-and-payroll decision rather than a payroll-only replacement is usually the better move. Features worth insisting on include rostering to a budget, real-time roster costings viewable by shift, employee, day, week and fortnight, and automatic roster notification to staff by email, SMS or app.

Where we fit

We have worked with Micropower and club payroll and rostering environments for many years, and with the club systems around them. A platform migration of this kind is exactly the sort of work that belongs on a planned roadmap with a financial-year boundary in mind, rather than being done under time pressure.

If you are still weighing this, the questions above are the right starting point and we are happy to work through them with you.

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