Improving payroll with elementTIME
Using Civica Authority or Altitude?
Make your payroll awesome and keep your ERP.
elementTIME makes your payroll in Civica Altitude or Authority better. In fact, it makes it a lot better without the need for creating yet another IT change project.
Proven by multiple councils of all sizes in Australia, elementTIME just works with your Altitude/Authority stack, EDRMS, Entra (and anything else). Better yet, elementTIME also future-proofs your organisation because, if you do change systems, it keeps working without your staff needing to burn hours on integration and setup.
How does it help?
Your payroll is far more than just paying people every week or fortnight. A well-supported payroll process provides:
Data on your workforce for your executive team (including overtime and leave liabilities)
Accurate costing to projects and work-orders for your financial team
Clear usage of plant to your plant coordinators and project owners
Consistent and accurate entitlements to your managers and supervisors
Reduced noise of constant requests to your payroll team
With support for multiple roles regardless of how you have your payroll set up. Each have clear and consistent application of awards that apply transparently to staff, managers, and payroll, so everyone knows what they are submitting and approving before they do it.
From automated timesheets to complex work patterns, elementTIME lets you turbocharge your payroll and workforce business without changing ERP or payroll systems.
Improving Civica Authority or Altitude payroll with elementTIME
Putting elementTIME with your Civica Authority or Altitude payroll transforms how your organisation does payroll – providing visibility, consistency, and evolving your payroll outcomes – all backed by in-application, on-demand, best-in-class, real-time support.
Your workforce
All staff (indoor and outdoor)
In elementTIME, they:
Enter records of work (mobile, web, and kiosk)
Record time against projects, work-orders, and plant
Apply, view, and manage leave
Managers/supervisors and payroll review and approve timesheets, leave, overtime, and higher duties
Time, attendance, and award interpretation engine
Automated award (entitlements) interpretation
Leave management
Schedules
Multiple roles and multiple rules
Integrated plantsheets
Real-time recording, clock in and out, facial recognition
Workgroups timesheets
Civica Authority or Altitude
ERP / Payroll / Finance / Plant
Payroll processing
Employee master
Finance/GL/work-orders
Asset/plant
Transparent and consistent timesheets and records of pay with auditable workflow
Leave transaction history and corresponding balances
Allowances and penalties
Up-to-date project and work-order costing
No-touch plant costing and tracking
When it comes down to it, one of the noisiest parts of the payroll process is the information: how it’s collected, how it’s sent around, how it’s managed, and how it’s then turned into useful data.
For dozens of local government organisations across Australia, elementTIME is integrated with Civica ERP systems to improve their payroll efficiency, accuracy, and staff experience. Think consistent, transparent entitlements and records of work.
For these organisations, elementTIME functions as an integrated specialist time, attendance, and award interpretation layer, allowing staff to enter records of work that suit the way they work, whether they:
- Are flexible, casual, part-time, or full-time (or all of them at once)
- Are indoor or outdoor (or a bit of both)
- Have set work, rotating work patterns, fully flexible hours, or auto timesheets
- Have multiple roles or multiple contracts
Staff can complete their records of work with detail that matches how they work, including costing to projects or work-orders, ad hoc allowances, integrated leave, higher duties, and plant usage in elementTIME. Whether on a web browser, dedicated mobile apps, or supported kiosks (with facial recognition).
elementTIME ensures all entitlements are automatically calculated in line with local government awards. Entitlements are reviewed (and approved) with conditional workflows, ensuring they are validated before payroll. Once finalised, the approved pay data flows directly into Altitude/Authority for standard pay processing, including plant costing and posting to financials.
Because elementTIME is designed to slot into your existing systems, you retain your ERP investment while significantly improving data quality and compliance upstream.
Remove the excuses
With elementTIME, your staff should just need to complete their timesheets to show when they worked, what they worked on, and what they used (plant).
elementTIME then works out their entitlements from overtime to penalties to auto allowances, so they can see what they are submitting.
Conditional workflow ensures the right roles are involved in the workflow and can see what they are approving before they approve it. Whether it is call outs or meal allowances, managers approve what will be paid – not just what is provided in a spreadsheet.
With fully tracked notifications, workflow, and consistent, transparent results, you can remove the ‘I didn’t know’ from your Authority/Alitude payroll processes and ensure each part of the payroll process has accountability and not just leave everything on the shoulders of your payroll officers.
Integrating is more than just an API
At a high level, while elementTIME normally integrates with Civica Authority and Altitude via the API services allowing syncing across multiple data points, including payrun, work-orders, leave, and employee data, elementTIME has additional options available to support users on different versions of the Civica ERP, including project, plant, and other datasets.
Accessing the data is one thing, but Civica Altitude and Authority can be set up in multiple ways. The trick is not just integrating with the data but making sure the integration matches how your Altitude and Authority instances are set up. This includes plant costing or management of staff with multiple roles, through to detailed system setup, such as how unpaid overtime, leave at half pay, and RDO and TIL balances are managed.
During implementation, we don’t just integrate; we work with your team to understand how your Authority and Altitude systems are set up and add prebuilt integration classes to ensure you don’t just get the data, you get the data the way you need it.
This is important as it reduces the impact and change management burden for your financial, payroll, and IT teams as we support your existing configuration rather than requiring a change to match ours. Your Authority or Altitude payroll and financials remain the owners of their relevant data.
Having established integrations across dozens of Australian local government organisations, elementTIME brings experience and a proven approach to ensure integrations are set up quickly and effectively and work. We just play really nicely without the need for supervision.
Before elementTIME
Much of the payroll burden sits with payroll
Manual interpretation of awards
Chasing timesheets and approvals
Correcting errors late in the cycle
Heavy reliance on payroll knowledge held by key staff
Inconsistent and reactive data management
With elementTIME implemented
The process changes fundamentally
Staff enter compliant records of work
Entitlements are calculated automatically
Managers review and approve before payroll sees the data
Exceptions are flagged early
Approved data flows directly into Authority
Alerts and notifications are automated
A customer example: Bega Valley Shire Council
Before elementTIME
Bega Valley Shire Council used Civica Authority for its core ERP and payroll engine. Authority was used to process payroll, but like many councils, Bega Valley Shire found that managing the complexity of local government awards, penalties, overtime, and allowances required significant manual effort.
The payroll team carried responsibility for checking, interpreting, and validating entitlements every pay cycle, including chasing missing data.
Authority was processing pay, but ensuring the inputs were correct required significant manual intervention and carried inherent compliance risk. Bega Valley Shire needed an option to derisk its payroll business without the need for replacing Authority.
Payroll Officer, Sonya Summerell, explains:
“Before elementTIME, we were manually checking and interpreting a lot of the entitlements. There was a lot more intervention from payroll each pay cycle.”
With elementTIME
Bega Valley Shire implemented elementTIME as a specialist workforce management platform. This has meant that award interpretation is now automated before payroll.
Team leaders and managers approve validated timesheets before payroll close, and entitlements are calculated automatically based on configured award logic.
The impact on payroll has been fundamental.
“It’s a lot less intense. We’re not manually calculating everything anymore — it just flows through.”
– Sonya Summerell
Manual interpretation, inconsistent workflow, and lack of data validation have been replaced with a structured and consistent automated process. The payroll engine remained the same, but everything relating to the management of the data changed.
Bega Valley Shire also switched from Civica Authority to Civica Altitude, and everything just continued to work; and the payroll team’s role shifted from reaction and noise management to oversight.
Issues are identified earlier in the process, and the pressure traditionally associated with payroll close has reduced materially. If there’s an issue, it’s picked up quickly, and it’s fixed quickly.
– Sonya Summerell
Integration with Civica Authority
For IT, integration stability was critical. Dean Klemm from Bega Valley Shire’s IT team coordinated the setup.
Once live, the integration became part of the process.
“It’s an API integration, so it’s structured and controlled. elementTIME led the setup – there wasn’t a huge burden on our IT team.”
“Once it was in, it just became part of the environment. There haven’t been any surprises. It’s tried and true — it just works.”
– Dean Klemm
Conclusion
elementTIME is a fundamental and strategic enhancement that builds on Civica Authority or Altitude to create a more controlled, automated, and consistent/transparent payroll environment.
For organisations still relying on manual award interpretation or heavy payroll intervention, Bega’s experience demonstrates a clear alternative:
Enhance existing payroll
Reduce payroll intervention
Provide accurate, auditable records of work for all staff
Drive accountability
Automate complex award interpretation
Strengthen payroll governance
Make data accessible and relevant
It just works!
If your organisation is using Civica Authority or Altitude and is still carrying award complexity, risk, and payroll pressure, elementTIME will strengthen your entire payroll function without forcing you to undergo a big project IT project. As Dean from Bega Valley Shire says, “It just works”.
Regardless of your software or your systems, if you do local government payroll, we hope this helps you get a jumpstart on putting a payroll governance policy in place.
If you have questions, just reach out…
Loved by local government across Australia
