Notes from the field: AU and NZ payroll platforms with Workday

These notes come from roughly the last five years of integrating Workday with Australian and New Zealand payroll platforms. Products change quickly, so a limitation described here may have been fixed since, and a feature that did not exist when I worked with a platform may exist now. Read this as a snapshot of field experience rather than a current product review, and confirm anything that matters with the vendor.

Each section starts with a short summary of the product and a link to its page, followed by my field notes. My involvement was not the same across all six. I implemented some, supported one integration that was already built, and researched one in depth without delivering it, and I call out which is which.

ADP Payforce (AU)

ADP Payforce is ADP's payroll platform for mid-to-large Australian businesses. It handles pay calculation and compliance obligations such as Single Touch Payroll and SuperStream, and is built to run across multiple industries and national offices.

Field notes

Payforce does not handle mid-period changes. If you are on a monthly pay cycle and someone's pay changes on the 20th, Payforce will pay at the higher rate. For a medium to large organisation that can be a make or break issue, because payroll staff still have to work out when a change occurred and calculate the difference themselves. It can also mean payroll needs to review every change in a period before processing pay data, in case one of them has an impact.

On every Payforce implementation I have put together or refined, I needed to build a reconciliation report around the payroll team's needs. It does the job, but it is usually something the team wants to streamline.

ADP Lyric (AU)

ADP Lyric HCM is ADP's newer all-in-one platform that brings payroll, HR and workforce management together. It launched in the US in 2024 and was rolled out across Australia and New Zealand in December 2025.

Field notes

Lyric is new to Australia, and having been through the first implementation with Workday and Lyric, I can say it leaves a lot to be desired. The integration templates are pulled from other ADP products, and much of the data in them is not actually used or ingested. That means looking at a template does not accurately reflect what the integration will do, and you cannot trust it as a guide to expected functionality.

The platform is effective dated, but there are limits around sending any type of transaction on the same day as an existing historic transaction. Those changes are also not taken into account for backpay.

Jade Star (NZ)

Jade Star is a New Zealand designed and supported people management system from Fusion5. It combines payroll, HR, leave management, self service and position management in one platform, and is aimed at larger and more complex organisations.

Field notes

I implemented this one in 2025, and it was the first time a vendor asked me, "what will you send us?" That question can be great or terrible, depending on the quality of the implementing consultants. Thankfully the Fusion5 consultants were excellent. They understood the client's business really well, and they understood the outputs I was delivering to them.

We decided to use Workday Studio to reformat the PECI output, because that was easier for Jade Star to ingest. The largest part of the work was aligning on payroll cutoff dates and the potential impacts of those dates.

Employment Hero (AU)

Employment Hero Payroll is a cloud-based payroll product built for Australian businesses, available on its own or as part of Employment Hero's wider HR, onboarding and employee experience platform. It was formerly known as KeyPay.

Field notes

I have not implemented this one myself. I did a large volume of research to give a client an accurate cost estimate for integrating it with Workday, so these notes are about what the build would involve rather than what it was like to deliver.

Employment Hero only offers APIs, and at the time of writing it provides no connectors for Workday. That means you need either your iPaaS or Workday Studio. This is not a bad option, but a custom Studio build to an external API in the payroll space can be complex and take a lot of time and testing.

Payslips are also not base64 encoded, to my knowledge, so an encoder within Studio may be needed when pulling those files.

MicrOpay (AU)

MicrOpay, now part of the Access Group and formerly Sage MicrOpay, is an established Australian payroll product that has been around for more than 35 years. It is built around local compliance and is available as a cloud or on-premise solution.

Field notes

MicrOpay gave us two options: build a solution against their API, or have one of their developers take a batch file and write a script that converts it into their APIs. The client went with the second approach. That naturally added to the overall complexity of the solution, but the person supporting the implementation was very understanding of the batch file we created and how both Workday PECI and their APIs behave, and that made a real difference.

From what I recall there were no major red flags with MicrOpay, but it was not the easiest platform to integrate with either.

Chris21 (AU)

Chris21 is the HR and payroll product from Frontier Software, a Melbourne company founded in 1983. It is a long-running platform used across government and the private sector, and it is now marketed under the iChris name as well.

Field notes

I did not implement Chris21, but I did support an existing integration to it that needed a lot of work. The solution used Workday PECI and Studio, along with AIS, which was a decision made by the architecture team.

Chris21 has a reputation for being difficult to get consultant support for from Frontier, which makes a troubled integration harder to turn around. The product also takes an "if it's blank in the integration, I'll blank it out in Chris21" approach. That requires every data element to be present in every scenario, which can be rather difficult to guarantee; and caused a lot of headache around setting pay related values to $0.

What the six have in common

The technical differences between these platforms matter less than a few questions that decide how an integration goes. How does the platform treat a change that lands mid-period, or on the same day as an earlier transaction, and does backpay pick it up? Does a blank value mean no change, or an instruction to clear the field? And does the template or documentation you are handed describe what the platform actually ingests?

The other pattern was the people. Jade Star and Micropay went well in large part because the consultants on the vendor side took the time to understand the business and the outputs Workday was producing. Chris21 was hard partly because that kind of support was hard to get. A product can have limits you plan around, but a vendor-side consultant who understands PECI is much harder to replace.

And lastly, I strongly recommend not only asking about the functionality of a platform, but the functionality of the integration (should you need it), as I've been on a number of implementations where the product natively does something, but the functionality cannot be integrated.

If you're coming up to a Workday to Payroll platform integration and want to be ready, give me a call. I'll ensure you get the best outcome.