Six hundred Dunedin student casuals, three rosters, and a Holidays Act calculation nobody in the building can reproduce

Availability capture and rostering with a payroll feed runs NZ$55,000 to NZ$85,000 over 4 to 5 months. A full workforce platform with employment status history and reporting is NZ$110,000 to NZ$150,000 over 6 to 8 months. If your HR system is adequate and only rostering hurts, a layer over it at NZ$32,000 to NZ$60,000 is the efficient move.

No. Gusto and ADP's mainstream products do not run New Zealand payroll, and BambooHR's payroll is a United States offering, so any of them would leave you running a separate local payroll anyway. Use a New Zealand payroll provider for the compliance engine and build or buy the workforce layer above it. Confirming this early saves a month of demos that go nowhere.

It does not calculate holiday pay for you; it makes the inputs reliable. Every availability change, shift swap, status change, and worked hour is recorded with a timestamp and an approver, so a calculation can be reproduced years later. Most remediation pain in New Zealand comes from missing or ambiguous inputs rather than from arithmetic.

Yes, if it is designed around your academic calendar rather than a generic month view. Staff mark exam blocks in advance, the rostering engine excludes them, and managers see the coverage gap weeks ahead instead of on the day. This single feature is often what justifies the project for Dunedin hospitality and accommodation employers.

Those stay with your payroll provider, which is where they belong. The custom layer supplies hours, rates, and cost allocation, then reconciles what payroll produced against what was rostered and approved. Keeping statutory deductions inside a maintained payroll product is the single best risk decision in this project.

Four to eight months to build, with go-live targeted at a quiet period such as late winter. Running a new rostering system for the first time during orientation week is how these projects earn a bad reputation. Work backwards from a July or August launch when you set the start date.

Yes, and you should insist on a documented export you can run yourself without the agency. Employment records carry retention obligations, so make sure the export includes full history rather than current state. Test the export before final payment rather than the first time you need it.

Finding a capable developer here is realistic, and Dunedin's lower turnover is genuinely helpful for a system with a long life. What is harder is finding someone who has worked with payroll integration, so plan for an agency relationship alongside an internal owner. The internal owner should come from operations, not IT.

Budget 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually for support, hosting, and enhancements, plus your existing payroll subscription which does not go away. On a NZ$85,000 build that is roughly NZ$13,000 to NZ$17,000 a year. Make sure the agreement includes work triggered by legislative change, or that becomes an unbudgeted invoice.

Because an accurate quote requires real work: mapping your workflows, finding the edge cases, and writing a specification, which typically takes 1 to 3 weeks and costs $2,000 to $10,000 at Digital Heroes depending on system complexity. You leave discovery owning a written spec and a fixed price you can take to any vendor, so the money is not locked into one agency. Free estimates are guesses, and the guess usually becomes your budget overrun six months later.

A working first version takes 12 to 16 weeks in Digital Heroes projects: employee records and onboarding first, then time off and reporting. A full platform with applicant tracking, performance reviews, and payroll integration is a 6 to 9 month effort. Anyone quoting a complete HR suite in 4 weeks is describing a template, not custom software.

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.

Three to five for a typical focused build: a project lead, one or two engineers, a designer, and part-time QA, which is the standard shape across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects. Larger platforms justify 6 to 10, but a ten-person team on a small first version usually signals bill padding rather than horsepower. What predicts success is whether a senior engineer is writing your code daily, not the headcount on the proposal.

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.

BambooHR is the easy case: full CSV exports plus an API for anything custom, and migration usually takes 2 to 4 weeks inside the project timeline. Workday is harder because data comes out through configured reports, so budget extra time and pull historical payroll and review records early. Keep a read-only archive of the old system for a year so nothing is lost if an auditor asks.

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 Dunedin. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.