Equity Trustees has grown rapidly through acquisition to become one of Australia’s leading specialist trustee companies. Equity Trustees has just under 500 employees, with 5 different workplace agreements in place that include different variations of full time including 37.5-, 38-, and 40-hour weeks.
Executive General Manager of People Georgie Taylor was preparing to implement Workday Human Capital Management (HCM)—an exciting step forward in modernizing people management—while assessing whether or not to replace its incumbent payroll system. To support the evaluation, Equity Trustee’s GM Project & Transformation engaged an independent consultant with expertise in both systems. “That was when all the benefits of having Workday Payroll, HCM, and Financial Management on the same platform and avoiding the complexities of large system integration—particularly payroll—became really obvious,” she says.
Faster payroll processing
Payroll processing is more efficient, with information flowing automatically among HR, finance, and payroll, removing the need for manual data entry. Automated calculations and prevalidation checks mean the payroll team is finalizing pay runs 40% faster, saving 8 days per month.
Georgie says tasks that once took days can now be completed within hours and with greater confidence in the results. “The speed is incredible—it means our team can get pay runs done with so much more certainty, freeing them up to focus on other strategic activities.”
Real-time compliance
For People Systems Analyst Jordyn Grubb one of the biggest benefits has been the way compliance is carried out throughout each pay cycle. Previously, compliance items could only be checked after a pay transaction was finalized. Now compliance is live, STP files can be created and verified, and journal errors can be corrected before payments go through. “It means we can catch any errors beforehand,” says Jordyn. “And it’s much easier to fix an error before a payment is finalised than it is to correct it afterwards.”
She says the system also automatically updates fields such as tax rates. “These fields are completely maintained by Workday, which means the payroll team doesn’t have to keep making updates as the legislation changes.”
Workday has made a massive improvement to our compliance capabilities.
People Systems Analyst
Demystifying tax calculationsPayroll teams are also finding complex payroll scenarios, including the tax calculations for employment termination payments, much easier to manage. Each component is automatically allocated to the correct tax code and calculation method, giving the teams clear visibility into how tax is applied.
For Jordyn, this transparency has been a game-changer. Instead of spending time dealing with routine tax queries, she can now quickly see how the tax has been calculated. This frees up her capacity to solve bigger payroll and people challenges that add greater value to the business.
Since implementing Workday Payroll for Australia, I can focus on the more hard-hitting questions than just our everyday tax calculations.
People Systems Analyst
Fair and equitable payWhenever a retroactive payment is needed, the system checks the entire workforce to see if any other employees are owed back pay due to role changes, bonuses, or other entitlements. If adjustments are needed, the system calculates and applies them to the correct pay run.
This proactive, automated approach helps safeguard against accidental underpayments, giving payroll teams confidence that every employee is paid fairly and in full. Instead of manually chasing errors, the team simply checks for accuracy, knowing the system has already done the heavy lifting.
Better teamwork and trustGeorgie says having a single source of truth reduces both time and risk. “Instead of salary changes and other employee variations managed in the HR system having to be rekeyed into payroll, they are instantly captured and automatically updated in the payroll module,” she explains.
With people, payroll, and finance now drawing on the same data, collaboration has become stronger as shared information—such as cost centers and locations—flows between functions. Data security has also tightened at Equity Trustees now as a single set of organization hierarchies, worker profiles, and security roles prevents unauthorized access to information.
Shared information among people, payroll, and finance has led to greater collaboration between teams and de-risks key processes such as onboarding and offboarding.
Executive General Manager, People
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