How to Track Staff Payments and Pay Dates Properly

Here's a small thing that causes a surprising amount of grief: the day the work gets done and the day you actually pay for it are hardly ever the same day. Someone finishes a fencing job on a Thursday. You pay them Thursday night by transfer, or you pay them Saturday once a customer deposit clears, or you slip them cash on Monday because that's when you saw them next. Three different jobs, three different gaps between work done and money paid. And if all of that lives in your head, eventually you'll get one of them wrong.

Getting staff pay wrong is the fastest way to lose a good worker. People will forgive a lot, but they will not forgive being paid late or being paid the wrong amount with no record to check against. So in this guide I want to walk through how to actually track staff payments — not in theory, but the way it happens on a real worksite, where dates slip and payments come in dribs and drabs.

Why the work-done date and the paid date are different things

Most simple systems only let you record one date against a payment. That's the trap. A single date forces you to pretend the work and the payment happened at the same moment, and they almost never do.

Think about how a normal week actually plays out:

• Work is done Monday, and you pay the same evening once you're off site. Work-done date and paid date are the same.
• Work is done Friday, but you don't transfer the money until Sunday night when you sit down with the banking app. Two-day gap.
• Work is done across the whole week, and you pay one lump sum at the end. The paid date covers several days of work.
• You pay an advance before the work is even finished because someone needs cash for the weekend. Paid date is before the work-done date.

If you only ever capture one date, you lose the story. When your worker says "hang on, you still owe me for Tuesday," you want to be able to point at a record that shows exactly what was for which day and when it was paid. Two separate dates — the day the work was done, and the actual date and time the money changed hands — is what makes that possible.

Record the real paid date and time, not when you meant to pay

This sounds obvious until you're doing it. The temptation is to log the payment for the day the work happened, because that's the date you remember. But the date that protects you is the one when the money actually left your account.

Why does the time matter as well as the date? Because disputes are usually about "did you pay me or not," and a timestamped record settles it instantly. "Paid at 6:42pm Friday, here's the entry" is the end of the conversation. It also helps you spot your own patterns — if you notice you're always paying two days after work-done, that tells you something about your cash flow you can plan around.

In Projects Plus, every staff payment is a cash-out entry against the job, and it carries both the work-done date and the actual paid date and time. So months later you can look at a job and see not just what you paid your crew, but exactly when — down to the hour.

Keep staff pay separate from your other expenses

Materials, fuel, dump fees and tool hire are one kind of money going out. Staff pay is another, and lumping them together makes both harder to read. When you're looking at a job and trying to work out where the money went, you want to see at a glance how much was labour versus how much was materials.

That's why Projects Plus colour-codes staff pay and keeps it visually separate from your other cash-out. Open a job and the staff payments stand out from the receipts and supplier costs immediately. No squinting, no mental arithmetic. You can answer "what did labour cost me on this one?" in a second, which is exactly the question that tells you whether a job was actually worth doing.

Once I could see labour in one colour and everything else in another, I stopped guessing at my margins. Some jobs I thought were my best earners were quietly the worst once the real wage bill was sitting right there.

A simple workflow for tracking staff payments

You don't need a payroll department. You need a habit you can do in thirty seconds on site or at the end of the day. Here's the order that works.

1. 1Log the work-done date as the job happens. Don't wait — note who worked and on what day while it's fresh.
2. 2Pay the way you normally pay — transfer, cash, whatever suits. Don't change your habits to suit the software.
3. 3Record the payment the moment it's made, with the actual paid date and time, not the day you intended to pay.
4. 4Mark it as staff pay so it's colour-coded and kept separate from materials and other expenses.
5. 5Attach proof if you have it — a transfer confirmation or screenshot — so there's never a "did that go through?" conversation.
6. 6Check the job total to see your real labour cost against everything else you've spent.

Do that consistently and you build, almost by accident, a complete and honest record of who you paid, for what work, and exactly when. That record is gold at tax time and it's peace of mind every other day of the year.

Projects Plus tracks staff pay with work-done and actual paid dates, colour-coded and separate from your other expenses — on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Pay tracking is only half the job

Tracking what you paid is one side of looking after your crew. The other side is having their details in order — phone numbers, emergency contacts, TFN and ABN — so that paying them is smooth and you're covered if something goes wrong. Pay records and staff records belong together, which is why Projects Plus keeps them in the same place. If you haven't sorted your crew's details yet, that's the natural next step — I've written about keeping complete staff records and why it matters more than most tradies think.

And when the job's done and you've got your real labour cost in hand, you can roll straight into a professional invoice built from what you actually spent — so the price you charge reflects the price the job actually cost you.

Frequently asked questions