Employment Hero pricing, and how to stop checking timesheets by hand.

How much does Employment Hero cost in Australia?

Employment Hero's HR Essentials plan is listed at $10 per employee a month and HR Engage at $14, each with a 10-user minimum. Payroll, rostering and full time and attendance sit in Employment Unlimited, which is quoted by sales. Rostering and Time and Attendance can also be added for $4 per employee a month, minimum $40.

Those are the figures on Employment Hero's Australian pricing page as of 29 October 2026. The page does not say whether GST is included, and billing is based on the greater of your minimum and your actual billable employees each month. If you want payroll run for you, Managed Payroll is a separate add-on at $20 per employee a month, minimum $400.

Does Employment Hero do timesheets?

Yes. Every HR plan includes basic timesheets. The parts a site-based business actually needs, like clock-ins from the phone app, geofencing around work sites and a photo at each clock event, come with time and attendance, either on Employment Unlimited or through the add-on. Managers review timesheets before they go into a pay run.

Employment Hero's time and attendance page says staff can only clock in and out from approved work locations, that a photo and location are taken at every clock event, and that a timesheet is created automatically after each shift. That is a big step up from paper or a group text. It still leaves a person reading every timesheet before pay day, which is where the time goes.

Employment Hero vs Deputy vs ClockShark: which suits a trades business?

Employment Hero makes sense when you want HR, payroll and timesheets in one place. Deputy is the cheapest published option for rostering and timesheets, and pushes approved timesheets into Xero. ClockShark is built for crews moving between job sites with job costing, but bills in US dollars on a three-year contract.

Sources: Deputy's Australian pricing, ClockShark's pricing page, Xero's Australian plans and the Deputy listing on the Xero App Store. Xero was running a new-customer discount on its first three months when we checked; the figures above are its usual prices.

The honest answer for most trades businesses is that the tool matters less than the check that happens after it. All three record when someone clocked in and where. None of them tells you, without someone reading it, that a timesheet says Tuesday at the hospital job when the site diary has nobody from your company there.

Why do timesheets still get checked by hand?

Because the timesheet app only knows what the worker entered. Whether that matches the roster, the job, the site diary and the hours you can bill lives in other systems, and nobody has joined them. So a payroll or office person opens each one and compares it in their head.

In a typical trades business the data is split across three or four places: the timesheet app, Xero for pay and invoicing, a job or project tool, and a spreadsheet the supervisor keeps. Across the sales calls we ran in October, "everything is disconnected" came up again and again, and admin landing after hours or on one person was the most common cost.

How do you automate timesheet checking?

Connect the timesheet tool to the other systems that know where people should have been, then run a check every day or week that compares them and lists only the exceptions. A person still approves pay. They just review ten flagged timesheets instead of reading all 100.

In practice it looks like this:

1. Pull the timesheets. Employment Hero, Deputy and ClockShark all let you export or read timesheets, either through Xero or directly.
2. Pull what should have happened. The roster, which crew was booked on which job, and anything the supervisor logged for the day.
3. Compare them against your rules. Hours on a job nobody was booked on, clock-ins outside a site, a full week with no site photos, overtime above a set limit, two people with identical times every day.
4. Send a short exceptions list to whoever approves pay, by email or Teams, with the reason each one was flagged.
5. Approve and push to payroll in the tool you already use, the same way you do now.

The joining is the real work, which is why we treat it as connecting your existing systems rather than buying another app. Where Xero is the centre of the business, our guide to Xero integrations covers which connections are worth having. If you are a Microsoft 365 shop, a lot of the scheduled checking can run in Power Automate with AI handling the messy parts, like reading a supervisor's free-text notes.

What can an automated timesheet check flag?

Anything you can write down as a rule and match against data you already hold. The useful ones are hours on a site with no booking, clock-ins outside the geofence, missing breaks, overtime over a threshold, and hours that will never be billed to a client because no job was attached.

• No-shows paid as work. The case that started the bricklaying firm's check: a week of hours with nothing on site to back it up.
• Hours with no job. Time that cannot be billed or costed. This is where margin quietly leaks on cost-plus work.
• Award and break problems. Long shifts without a break, or overtime that should have been approved first.
• Patterns, not single entries. The same start and finish times every day for weeks, or one crew always running late on the same site.

What it should not do is approve pay on its own. AI is good at reading a supervisor's notes and spotting things that do not line up. It is not the person who knows a worker swapped sites because a delivery was late. Keep a human on the final approval, and use the check to decide where they look.

What should you sort out before you automate timesheets?

Clean names and codes. Every employee should match exactly between your timesheet tool and payroll, every job and site should have one code used everywhere, and your rules should be written down. Automation on messy data just produces a faster mess.

ClockShark's own Xero setup is a good example: employees have to be mapped between the two systems before anything exports, and Xero's timesheet categories need adjusting first. The same goes for every tool here. Spend the first week tidying codes and writing your rules, then build the check. Once it runs, the same connected data gives you a weekly labour report per job almost for free, which is the kind of thing we set up under automated reporting.

If staff log their own time on site, look at how site dockets work too. A Perth surveying firm, KR Surveys, is planning its own docket app so site times and client sign-off flow straight into invoicing with no exports in between.