Honest Review (2024)
KeyPay

Excellent employee cost management, all-in-one payroll reporting, and live location tracking, but limited user support and inability to handle large businesses.

Written by Asim Qureshi
By Asim Qureshi, CEO Jibble

August 21st 2024

As a CEO of a time tracking software company I need to know what my competitors are up to. That means I’m often researching about and/or playing around with their products — you know, it’s part of the job. Here, I share my findings of that research, giving credit to those competitors where credit is due and being honest about which products I believe you really need to avoid. And so, there you have it, this review, and in it, I try to be honest, fair, and insightful…

This Review Covers:

Overview

KeyPay is a comprehensive, cloud-based payroll software built with Aussie businesses in mind. Its features include single touch payroll reporting, award interpretation, compensation management, rostering, employee self service, compliance management, third-party integration, and automation.

One of KeyPay’s strengths is that it is an “all in one solution” and examples of this include compliant payslip templates, custom rules for pay conditions, live location tracking, and report packs. It also has more than twenty third-party integration options–not only for accounting purposes, but also for workforce management, human resources, and a whole lot more. The software is customizable, user-friendly, STP compliant, intuitive, and streamlines reporting with great visibility.

However, to ensure the best user experience, there are some major areas the company needs to focus on. While it is easy to use and has a large suite of tools to choose from, it needs to improve on the customer support front — users frequently complain about being unable to talk to support over the phone. Large organizations also face the issue of KeyPay not being able to handle a large amount of data, which means the software isn’t viable for big corporations and is mainly suitable for small to medium businesses. It also doesn’t have direct deposit, which means users can’t pay directly to employees’ bank accounts.   

Despite these shortcomings, I find KeyPay to be a good software overall, especially for smaller businesses. There is a lot of room for improvement, but its features and ease of use make it a product worth exploring.

Now, before we make any judgements, it’s only fair to first take a look at what else the software has to offer. So, without further ado, let’s dive right into this KeyPay review!

Overview of KeyPay's dashboard

What Do Users Like About KeyPay?

  • Built-in Award Interpreter
  • Great UX
  • Automation 
  • Customizable 
  • Easy STP compliance 
  • Intuitive
  • Easy reporting and better visibility
  • Compensation management

What Don’t Users  Like About KeyPay?

  • No live training 
  • No phone support
  • Not viable for large organizations
  • Has to be set up without live support
  • No direct deposit

What Pricing Plans Does KeyPay Offer?

When it comes to pricing, KeyPay’s website is a little vague. There are two packages, Standard and Plus, but the prices are not listed on the website. While the company’s reasoning for this is that each package is created according to the user’s requirements, not having a ballpark figure on the website is frustrating.  

The Standard plan comes with access to all user data, an unlimited number of clients and employees, customizable payroll, employee self-service, timesheets, reporting, single touch payroll reporting, automated super payments, integrations with third-party apps, document management, leave management, accelerated employee onboarding, and the WorkZone mobile app.

The Plus plan comes with all the features of Standard, plus award interpretation, rostering, dimensions functionality, time and attendance kiosk, and pay conditions engine.

What are the Standout Features of KeyPay?

1. Actionable Insights and Reports

KeyPay’s reporting is divided into four categories, namely time and attendance, employee, ATO, and payroll. This gives users the ability to view financial data with ease and apply a number of filters to get the results relevant to their needs. It also gives visibility to changes to employee profiles and makes it easy to identify who made those changes. Furthermore, it allows managers to see which employees have not submitted important documents, so they can do follow-ups.

What I liked best was the report packs feature. It generates bundles of reports that can be emailed to specific lists according to a predetermined schedule. This automation is a time saver that eases administrative burden and ensures that important reports reach their intended recipients on time, every time.

KeyPay's report packs can be sent to email lists according to a schedule.

2. Labor Cost Tracking

Having a handy labor and cost-tracking tool is essential in keeping operations healthy and profitable. KeyPay seamlessly integrates with Xero, and this integration helps businesses review their expenses based on specific locations.

Through this integration, users can track how much resources are being spent on particular business locations or cost centers by applying tracking categories. It lends more efficiency to a process that is known to be quite a laborious one. This is particularly useful in generating multi-location reports for labor costs, budgeting, and allocating wage costs accordingly.

KeyPay's track and report labor costs for better budgeting

3. KeyPay Employee Portal

KeyPay’s employee portal empowers every individual in a company to access their data, find the information they need, and manage basic requests. Managers are able to monitor what data is being requested, and approve or reject requests accordingly.

This accessibility feature reduces HR’s workload significantly and helps save time and resources. Information such as bank account details, contact information, super funds, and payslips are available on this portal. Plus, it also helps eliminate the need for inefficient papers and emails in approving work-related documents, thus making life easier for everyone in the ranks, and allowing them to get or give approval anytime and anywhere.

The portal also allows for all employee expenses to be logged directly into the system. Employees can specify the expense category, upload receipts, and claim expenses through the same portal.  

The best part? All of these can be done through KeyPay’s mobile app, WorkZone.

Leave management in KeyPay's employee self-service

4. KeyPay Time and Attendance Management

Clock Me In is KeyPay’s time and attendance management app, and it has both geo-location and photo tracking, which ensures accuracy in logged data and an additional layer of security and accountability. Timesheets are automatically generated according to the employee’s clock-in data, and uploaded to the mobile app. External timesheets can also be added from third-party sources or as CSV files. 

I like the fact that Clock Me In enables managers to clock out employees if needed and accept or discard shifts. All rectifications are possible in real time, so no time is lost in fixing human errors. This not only helps efficiency, but also helps deal with attendance-related issues like employees forgetting to clock out after a shift or clocking in to work late. 

Attendance management and live tracking with KeyPay's Clock Me In

5. KeyPay Roster Calculator

With KeyPay’s roster calculator, users can do roster costing, allocate their finances, and observe how much resources are being spent on each employee. They can set a budget against any roster to track expenses as employee shifts are added, simplifying ROI calculation and helping in strategic decision-making. 

Other rostering features include reorganizing rosters, allowing shift swapping and bidding, and making roster templates. KeyPay’s roster templates work well and help users plan resource requirements for specific projects without having any effect on their standard or everyday roster. And to help with efficiency, preferred roster templates can be saved and reused later on.

KeyPay's roster builder

Positive User Highlights

  • “Compliances are always up to date, making it a hassle free option for payroll needs.” Christine D. (Source G2)
  • “KeyPay honestly makes processing payroll a breeze… It’s the most easy to use, streamlined system I’ve had the pleasure of using. The built-in Award interpreter is fantastic!!” Angelique (Source GetApp)
  • “Once you get to know the product it is very thorough and relatively easy to use and a huge time saver especially if you have a reasonable amount of employees.” Bob (Source Capterra)
  • “Full featured and customisable payroll software. Most of the standard features (once you become familiar with the product) are easy to use.” Fiona (Source GetApp)
  • “Our employees work across different locations. We are able to capture the wages costs per location by creating location cost centres…” Deidre (Source GetApp)
  • “I found Keypay quite simple and easy to use. STP reporting just a click of a button.” Tammy (Source GetApp)
  • “One of the better payroll systems I’ve used in my time, handles most scenarios.” Xanthe (Source Capterra)
  • “Easy to use. Makes payroll very quick and easy. End of month reporting is straightforward. Excellent for time and attendance.” Meiche (Source Capterra)
  • “Since implementing KeyPay, the time and attendance app Clock Me In gives visibility of timesheets allowing the HR and payroll team – and supervisors – to see time worked by employees and whether staff may have forgotten to clock in or out. Eliminating the need to check data and chase staff, payroll went from being a day-long process a week to a couple of hours…” Chloe (Source GetApp)
  • “What I like most is the ease of use, it is very user friendly” Fiona (Source Capterra)
  • “Easy to learn program, very intuitive and ticks ALL the boxes. Support is fantastic and very responsive. The Workzone App is a great feature for staff to use, making viewing of payslips & lodging leave requests a simple process. Electronic lodgement for TFN declarations, STP compliant – everything is so easy when using KeyPay. Very cost effective, makes payroll a breeze.” Jule (Source Capterra)
  • “I am finding Keypay good because I have been able to link it in with my current Financial Programme.” Trudy (Source Capterra)
  • “Keeps all leave records and automatically calculates tax, super etc. Enables us to be STP compliant with a relatively easy format.” Tracey (Source Capterra)
  • “Keypay makes a serious and complex task much easier to understand and to execute. I know all my clients are up to date and compliant with ATO and super regulations. It is totally cloud-based so I can run or check payroll from anywhere in the world..” Karla (Source GetApp)

Negative User Highlights

  • “Does not have the facility to have multiple companies within one login, if you have a separate entity you will need a 2nd login.” Victoria R. (Source SourceForge)
  • “The Payroll Support resources are a great tool for helping to navigate using the software, however these resources are limited in their information…I will let them know this when I reach out, that I wasn’t able to find the information I was looking for..I get a very basic response to my question and a link to the Support page where I have just come from!” Emma (Source GetApp)
  • “It is a steep learning curve to get it running and set up properly particularly with our business.” Carole (Source Capterra)
  • “..Customer Service, helpline, can I suggest that you have a service, where you can speak to someone on the phone, it’s extremely hard and frustrating being only able to communicate and resolve an issue, via chat line.” Deb (Source Capterra)
  • “Reporting outputs can be very poor, it struggles with large amounts of information and can’t extract the data. Support isn’t great, emails only and no clear way of contacting someone urgently. Can’t handle more than 1,000 employees in one payrun so is ineffective for large organisations.” Verified User (Source G2)
  • “Inability to print directly from the screen. This is a pain. particularly when working with remote clients that aren’t good with computers. having to direct them over the phone to where they might have saved the reports to then print them is annoying.” Nikki (Source GetApp)
  • “Linux not supported. Or I cant use it on my Linux laptop” Antti (Source GetApp)
  • “Not being able to ring support..I remember the pain when I first started using it. As it is so full featured, it was a bit overwhelming. I wish there was an introductory class room training course that I could have attended. Would have happily paid for it.” Fiona (Source Capterra)
  • “That I had some problems setting up TOIL as most of our employees don’t work a standard 7.5 hour day” Fiona (Source Capterra)
  • “The frequent updates of the award mean I have to fix some set rules etc each time I update.” Meiche (Source GetApp)
  • “..There are numerous videos and instruction papers to watch and read in Keypay but it still understandably takes time to put it all into perspective and gain confidence.” Bob (Source Capterra)

What are KeyPay’s Ratings from Other Review Sites?

(As of January 2024)

  • Capterra: 4.5/5
  • G2: 4.5/5
  • GetApp: 4.5/5
  • Featured Customers: 4.8/5
  • Software Advice: 4.5/5
  • Play Store: 2.4/5
  • App Store: 4.7/5

What’s My Final Verdict on KeyPay?

As we conclude this KeyPay  review, I must say that the software is a well thought-out product that has features to accommodate the payroll needs of Aussie businesses. Features such as award interpretation, roster calculation, report packs, and attendance management are well-designed and truly help improve efficiency by taking on repetitive and time-consuming tasks. 

The product is also great at automation and offers it where it’s most needed. For example, with Clock Me In, live location data is uploaded and timesheets are generated automatically for managers to view and approve or amend. This data is then interpreted automatically and reflected into the upcoming pay run. 

Now, I promised you an honest KeyPay review, so I’ll also discuss its shortcomings.

With all of its awesome features, KeyPay is lacking in one important area: customer support. There is a lack of phone support and very little help when it comes to setting up the software. It also lacks direct deposit, making it inconvenient to pay employees. Lastly, it sucks at catering to large organizations as it is unable to handle a large amount of data.

Since the company was recently acquired by Employment Hero, we can’t be sure of what direction the parent company will take KeyPay in, but of course, we hope for the best.