D-Bit Case Study : Recruitwest

Bringing Workforce, Payroll and Billing into a Single Platform

The client

Established in Perth in 2001, RecruitWest is one of Western Australia's leading recruitment and labour hire providers, operating from South Perth and Bunbury and specialising in the industrial and resources sectors: mining, construction, engineering, logistics and food services.

The company places and manages large contingent workforces across ad-hoc labour and short-term and seasonal assignments, alongside permanent placements, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and HR consultancy. That business model carries a distinctive operational signature: hundreds of workers on shifting sites and rosters, timesheets flowing in daily, award-heavy pay conditions, and client invoices that must reconcile precisely to every hour paid.

For a labour hire business, payroll is the product, not merely a back-office function.

The challenge

Despite this, due to rapid growth, RecruitWest's payroll and workforce administration had some manual and disjointed processes.

Payroll processing involved a chain of separate workflows - onboarding, timesheets, expenses, approvals, EFT payment processing, STP submission and payslip distribution - each with its own handoffs, and no single system tying them together.

Timesheet capture and Award Interpretation had become a genuine bottleneck.

Capturing hours was only the first step: each timesheet then needed alternate approvers and escalation paths for when managers were unavailable, and a final payroll approval gate before anything was processed. Around the pay cycle sat a broader employee lifecycle that had outgrown manual handling. This included structured onboarding for new starters, account creation, welcome communications, and self-service updates that are expected by any workforce, let alone one as mobile as RecruitWest's.

Because labour hire invoicing is inseparable from payroll, the administrative load compounded at the billing end.

Recruitment and labour hire operations demand complex client-specific invoicing rules, varied payment terms, ad-hoc invoices and disciplined accounts receivable reporting. This work was difficult to sustain manually and impossible to reconcile quickly when it relied on data trapped outside the payroll system.

Integration was a further requirement. RecruitWest needed data changes in its payroll system to flow back to its Salesforce CRM, so that recruitment, client and payroll records stayed consistent across both products rather than being captured and maintained twice.

Much of the scrutiny over these gaps came from RecruitWest's accountant, Jacinta Scanell, whose remit spans every facet of financial accounting, management reporting and payroll, together with statutory compliance across the ATO, BAS, PAYGW, the Office of State Revenue, superannuation and the Construction Industry Long Service Leave scheme.

From her vantage point, payroll delays posed a clear reputational risk (in labour hire, a late pay run damages trust with both workers and host employers) yet the existing arrangements offered no meaningful service credits for failure, no rework compensation when system faults created additional effort, and no measurable uptime commitments or outage compensation.

Budget discipline was equally important. With implementation projects, the concern was that effort could exceed estimates after solution design, and RecruitWest wanted formal change control with approval required for significant scope increases.

Security and continuity mattered in a function handling sensitive workforce and tax data, prompting requests for clarity around disaster recovery procedures, ISO 27001 certification, storage limits and performance baselines, and business continuity processes. And looking to the long term, RecruitWest wanted assurance about data portability: the ability to retrieve payroll and operational data in structured formats with clear data ownership.

Finally, as an Australian labour hire operator, the platform had to natively handle award interpretation and management, superannuation clearing house processes, and email communication workflows. The compliance capability on which statutory obligations depend could not be an afterthought!

The solution

D-BIT's workforce management platform was built specifically for labour hire and recruitment operators across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. It consolidates exactly these fragmented workflows into a single, cloud-based solution.

End-to-end payroll workflow automation brings onboarding, leave, timesheets, expenses, approvals, EFT processing, STP submission and payslip distribution into one system, with support for multiple pay runs per period, and controlled lock-and-release processing.

A workflow-driven approval engine handles timesheet capture, multi-level approvals, alternate approvers and escalation paths, with a payroll approval gate before processing. Because the platform consumes timesheet data directly, invoices are generated automatically against the same data that drove the pay run, honouring per-client invoicing rules, payment terms and ad-hoc billing, with AR reporting alongside.

Employee lifecycle management is native: structured onboarding with account creation, welcome communications and tax/detail capture, and a self-service portal where employees view payslips, manage bank accounts and keep their details current.

This reduces administration for RecruitWest's team while improving data quality at the source.

Award interpretation, superannuation processes and SMS communications are integrated payroll compliance functionality, not bolt-ons. They support the full statutory picture an accountant manages, from PAYGW and BAS through superannuation and state-based levies.

Standard operational reporting covers day-to-day management, with export capability for advanced analytics and data warehouse integration.

Salesforce integration is native to the platform. Data moves in both directions between the two systems, so client, placement and payroll records stay aligned and consistent across both products. RecruitWest's team works from one set of records, not two.

Around the platform, D-BIT has committed to the governance framework RecruitWest asked for: an enhanced SLA with payroll deadline commitments, measurable uptime monitoring and outage compensation.

This is needed together with rework compensation mechanisms:

• a formal change request process requiring approval for significant scope increases so project costs remain predictable;

• a documented disaster recovery strategy and business continuity processes backed by independent ISO 27001 certification, with defined storage allocation and a scaling framework; and

• guaranteed data portability - exportable payroll and operational data in structured formats such as CSV and SQL, with clear data ownership (should the relationship ever end).

Why it matters

For a labour hire business whose product is reliable people, delivered on time, and paid correctly, the consolidation of workforce, payroll and billing into one single governed platform is more than an efficiency exercise.

It converts RecruitWest's manual processes into automated, auditable workflows and, for the person ultimately accountable for them, it turns statutory compliance from a recurring scramble into a controlled, reportable process backed by contractual commitments on availability, cost control, security and data ownership.