Ento’s Award Interpreter Fact Sheet & Pricing Guide

Overview

Awards, commonly referred to as ‘EA’, ‘EBA’, ‘Enterprise Agreements’, ‘Enterprise Bargaining Agreements’ or ‘Modern Awards’ are sets of pay & compliance rules; built, calculated, and maintained in Ento’s proprietary award interpretation engine.
Ento’s award interpretation engine has the flexibility and power to support thousands of unique and complex rule scenarios simultaneously, while fast enough to support real-time, on-the-fly optimisation and decision-making.
We’ve successfully automated Award and EBA interpretation for hundreds of businesses across a wide range of industries including healthcare, hospitality, retail, facility-management, security, construction and many more.
How Ento’s award interpretation engine works
Ento’s award managed service
Supported rules and conditions
Frequently asked questions

How Ento’s award interpretation engine works

• Cost calculation and assignment of rostered and authorised hours to pay rate categories
• Enforcing compliance rules that set restrictions on the way staff can be rostered
• Real-time on-roster cost vs budget management and approval thresholds
• ‘What if?’ analysis on cost & compliance for shift swaps and critical decision points
• Cost reporting and history including full audit logs on every shift
• Compiles and formats data for direct integration with leading payroll systems
• Managing leave requests, accruals and deductions

Ento award profiles are unique sets of rules and conditions that determine how the above is calculated for each staff group. Each award profile set up for your account is built to your specific requirements.
These may be based on Fair Work Australia Award documents (such as the General Retail Industry Award 2010), on other sets of documented rules (such as Enterprise Bargaining Agreements), or on simple rules for contractors and employees who are paid a fixed salary.

Ento’s award managed service

Ento builds and supports awards as a managed service. This includes:

• Initial consultation, a documented scope/build plan, and configuration of your award within your Ento account
• Each award includes up to three award profile variations for Full time, Part time, and Casual employees
• Changes to earning rates as required (e.g. when CPI adjustments to relevant awards or EBAs take effect)
• Proactive monitoring and alerting of planned and upcoming changes to the Australian Modern awards by Fair Work that may affect your business
• Quarterly audit against payroll outputs on request
• Up to one major rebuild (useful in case of Fair Work changes, etc.) of each award every 12 months at no additional cost

*POA we’ll need some additional information on the way your payroll system is configured before we can provide an accurate price.

Supported rules and conditions

Ento’s award interpretation supports a huge range of conditions and rules. The table below includes a breakdown of the most common rules included in each award service level. Please contact us directly to discuss any requirements that are not listed below.

**Required to support an integration with a payroll system configured with fixed pay categories based on:

• Award Level (e.g. ‘Level 3 Saturday’)
• Age (e.g. ‘18yo Overtime1.5’)
• Role type (e.g. ‘Supervisor Sunday’)

Frequently asked questions

“What is the process for requesting a new award build or changes to an existing award?”
Contact the Ento support team via contact@ento.com with details of your requirements, and we’ll come back to you with information on the next steps.

“How long does it take to build or make changes to an award?”
Simple adjustments can sometimes be made within 24 hours, while a complex new build that includes requirements scoping, configuration and extensive testing may take a number of weeks.
Although we’ll do our best to meet your timeline requirements, it’s always best to contact us as early as possible.

“Why do we need a custom build?”
Ento treats all new Award Profiles as bespoke for each client, because:

• Most agreements have options for how specific scenarios are treated by the employer.
• Not all rules and conditions are relevant to every business.
• Each business will have a unique configuration of pay codes/elements for the purposes of payroll integration
• Not all businesses interpret Award/EBA documents in exactly the same way

“Can Ento automatically determine someone’s pay rate based on their date of birth?”
By design, Ento will never automatically change a staff base rate of pay without an approval step. Ento can provide information on upcoming birthdays (both in the Manager dashboard and in exportable reports) so that base rates can be adjusted at the right time, via an Ento workflow that includes appropriate approval and review steps.

“Are there any rules/conditions Ento’s award interpreter can’t support?”
While Ento’s award interpreter is powerful and flexible and we have successfully automated award interpretation and timesheet-to-payroll processing for hundreds of organisations large and small, the ambiguity of some rules means it is not always practical or desirable to fully automate them.
Supported via a manual step when rostering:

• Split shift allowances
• Overtime rules that have different hour limits on different days

Not supported:

• Contracted hours overtime ‘averaging’ that occurs over a period that is different from the pay cycle period (e.g. monthly overtime averaging on a fortnightly pay cycle).
• Split pay cycles (i.e. where pay rate, employment type or contracted hours change part way through the pay cycle). Ento will apply any changes from the beginning of the following full pay cycle forward.

“Is there ongoing development to the award interpretation engine?”
Ento has invested significantly into the flexibility and performance of the award interpretation engine and will continue to do so in future. Support for additional rules and conditions will be largely driven by customer demand.