BambooHR does not know what a SCHADS broken shift is, and your Geelong care roster does

Geelong HR and rostering builds run A$50k to A$120k depending on payroll depth. Award-aware rostering starts near A$50k, while a full HR and STP payroll platform reaches A$135k.

BambooHR, Workday, and Gusto are built for US payroll and do not handle Single Touch Payroll, superannuation, or the SCHADS Award. Geelong care providers end up running Australian payroll separately and reconciling by hand, which custom software removes.

Yes. A custom Geelong build can encode SCHADS penalties, broken shifts, sleepovers, and minimum engagements so pay is calculated correctly from the roster. That is usually the main reason care providers commission it.

Yes. It can report Single Touch Payroll Phase 2 to the ATO and calculate the superannuation guarantee at the current rate. Insist your developer demonstrates STP output during testing.

Plan for 10 to 18 weeks. Award-aware rostering can go live in 10 to 13 weeks, while a full HR and payroll platform takes 16 to 20, with parallel pay runs before cutover.

Employee and payroll data for a Geelong build should be hosted onshore in Australia under the Australian Privacy Principles, with role-based access. Confirm hosting location before you sign.

Award rates change, so your build needs a clear plan to update them, usually through a maintainable rate engine and a support arrangement. Ask exactly how a Fair Work rate change reaches your payroll.

Yes. Custom HR software can push pay data to Xero or your accounting platform so the general ledger and super payments reconcile automatically. This integration is scoped in discovery.

If your team is small and salaried with simple rosters, an off-the-shelf Australian payroll tool may be enough. Custom HR pays off when award complexity and rostering volume make manual reconciliation costly and risky.

Usually not; companies that bring Digital Heroes their Workday quotes have been looking at six-figure implementations with 6 to 12 month rollouts before any customization starts. A custom HR platform scoped to what a 200-person company actually uses typically costs less than that implementation alone. Under 500 employees you would be paying for enterprise depth you will not touch for years.

Almost always yes, through CSV exports or the vendor's API, and migration should be scoped as its own workstream with field mapping, a dry run, and a planned cutover window rather than an afterthought. The real time sink is rarely moving the data; it is cleaning it, since years of duplicates, free-text fields, and inconsistent formats surface all at once. Pull a full export from your current vendor before committing to anything new, because some SaaS plans restrict exports on lower tiers.

Gusto's Plus plan lists at $80 per month plus $12 per person, so a 250-employee company pays roughly $37,000 a year for workflows it cannot change. The common fix is keeping Gusto for payroll, which it does well, and building custom software for onboarding, scheduling, and PTO around it through Gusto's API. That caps the subscription at payroll only while the workflows finally match how you operate.

Ask two questions: show me a project where you handled sensitive employee data, and walk me through how you would stop a manager from seeing salaries outside their team. Teams that have built HR systems answer the second one immediately with role-based access design; teams that have not will improvise. Also ask which payroll APIs they have integrated, because ADP, Gusto, and Paychex each behave differently in practice.

A single well-scoped module such as leave management, onboarding checklists, or a review cycle tool usually costs $8,000 to $25,000 and ships in 4 to 8 weeks in Digital Heroes projects. This is the cheapest way to fix the one workflow BambooHR or Gusto handles badly without replacing the whole system. The module reads and writes through your existing platform's API, so nothing gets migrated.

You should own it outright, with the contract assigning full intellectual property to you on final payment and the code living in a repository you control from week one. Watch for agencies that license you their platform, because that recreates the vendor lock-in you left BambooHR to escape. Digital Heroes assigns 100 percent of custom code to the client; the only carve-outs should be standard open source libraries.

The breaking point Digital Heroes sees most often is 100 to 250 employees, when approval chains, multi-state rules, or shift scheduling stop fitting BambooHR's fixed workflows and HR starts managing exceptions in spreadsheets. If your team exports to Excel every week to do something the platform cannot, you have already outgrown it. Per-employee pricing compounds the problem, since the bill grows with every hire while the feature gaps stay the same.

Nothing, if the handover was done right: you hold the repository, the cloud accounts, the deployment runbook, and the schema documentation, so any competent team can take over maintenance. This is why code ownership and infrastructure access belong in the contract rather than in goodwill. Ask for the handover package as a deliverable of the first release, not something promised for later.

Digital Heroes builds custom HR software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Geelong. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.