Set staff pay rates and weekend loadings

Staff pay rates live in Settings → Scheduling, in two parts: a default hourly rate for each role, and the loadings that lift that rate on weekends, evenings, public holidays and overtime. The loading percentages are yours to type — you are not stuck with the preset. Only owners and admins can change them; everyone else sees the page read-only.

Part 1: a default rate for each role

The first card is Default pay rates by role. Enter a dollar figure per hour against each role — Wait Staff, Chef, Manager and so on.

These are a fallback, not the only place a rate can live. CaterCloud works down three rungs in order:

1. A rate set on the individual shift.
2. The rate on that staff member's record.
3. This role default.

So the role default is what costs a shift when neither the shift nor the person has a rate of their own. Leave a role blank on purpose if you would rather CaterCloud kept flagging its unrated shifts than quietly costed them at a guess.

Part 2: weekend, evening and public-holiday loadings

Further down the same page is Penalty rates (casual) — weekend, evening and public-holiday loadings plus award overtime, applied to every wage figure in CaterCloud: schedules, timesheets, wages and your event P&L.

It is off by default. Turn on Apply penalty rates to wage costs and the rest of the section appears.

Tell it what your rates already include

Before you touch a single percentage, set My entered rates are…. This is the one that catches people out, because it decides what every multiplier is applied to:

• Loaded Mon–Fri pay — the rate you actually pay a casual on a weekday, loading already in it. This is the usual answer, and the default.
• Award base rates — the base rate before any casual loading is added.

On Loaded Mon–Fri pay, CaterCloud works the base rate back out by dividing what you entered by the Mon–Fri multiplier, then applies every other multiplier to that base. So with a Mon–Fri multiplier of 1.25 and an entered rate of $31.25 an hour, the base is $25, and a Saturday at 1.5 costs $37.50 an hour. Get this field wrong and every weekend figure is wrong by the same slice.

The loadings themselves

Each ordinary-hours loading is a multiplier of the base rate, and each one is editable:

• Mon–Fri — weekday ordinary hours.
• Saturday
• Sunday
• Public holiday

Two more are flat dollars per hour rather than multipliers, added to weekday ordinary hours only:

• Evening 7pm–12am
• Night 12am–7am

A multiplier can't go below 1 — it can lift a rate, never cut it.

Overtime

Under the same switch, Daily OT after (hours per day) and Weekly OT after (hours per week) say when overtime starts; set either to 0 to turn that trigger off. Then four more multipliers set what it pays: M–F first 2h, M–F after 2h, Weekend and Public holiday.

While penalty rates are on, this overtime replaces the simpler Overtime rules higher up the page. The page tells you so where those rules sit, so you are not setting the same thing twice.

If your award isn't hospitality

There is one preset button, Apply Hospitality Award (MA000009) casual rates, and it does exactly one thing: fills the boxes with that award's casual figures as a starting point.

It is a starting point, not a constraint. If you are under a different award — fast food, restaurant, or anything else — every percentage on this page is editable right now. Type your own award's numbers straight in, over the top of whatever is there. Nothing on the page is locked to hospitality, and you don't need a preset for your award to exist first.

A practical way to do it: press the preset to fill every box, then correct each figure to your own award. That is quicker than starting from blanks and it guarantees you don't leave one empty.

Public holidays need a state: set State / territory so CaterCloud knows which gazetted holidays to rate. Outside Australia there are no presets at all — the page says so, the multipliers are entirely yours, and the public-holiday multiplier stays idle until holiday dates exist for your market.

Saving

Pay rates and scheduling preferences share one Save changes bar at the bottom of the page. Make all your edits, then save once.

What these numbers then drive

Everything that puts a dollar figure on labour reads them: the cost of a shift as you build a roster, your timesheets and wages, and the labour line in each event's P&L — which is what makes an event's profit figure true or fiction.

Two honest limits. CaterCloud costs your labour with these rates; it does not pay anyone — it is not a payroll system. And it cannot check your figures against your own award for you, so set them from your award's own rates and review them when those rates change.