Agency and PAYG locum shift tracking

A portfolio locum rarely has a single employer or a single payslip. You might pick up agency shifts, invoice a clinic directly, and do bank shifts at a public hospital, all in the same month. No agency portal and no single payslip shows the lot, which is exactly where income slips through the cracks: a short payment here, an unpaid super contribution there, a tax reserve that quietly drifts because half your work never landed in the same place.

Sessional logs each shift the same way regardless of how the work reached you. The difference between an agency booking and a direct booking is not a different app, it is a single field on the shift: the income source. That field is what fans out into your super gap, your PSI diagnostic, and your payroll-tax view, so it is worth getting right.

Every shift carries an income source that records where the money came from. When a workplace books you through your public profile, the income source is set on the booking request and copied onto the shift when you accept; you can change it later on a shift you have logged yourself. The options cover the ways AU locums actually get paid:

• Agency-managed: a locum agency books the shift, pays you, and bills the workplace. The agency sets its own service fee.
• Direct contractor: you contract with the workplace and it pays you at an agreed hourly, daily, session, or percentage-of-billings rate.
• Direct patient billing: Medicare or patient receipts land in your name and the workplace takes a service fee. Increasingly common since Thomas and Naaz.
• Public hospital, casual or bank: short-notice shifts paid through hospital payroll. The hospital treats this as employment, so super arrives via PAYG.
• Public hospital, VMO or contract, plus mine site, aeromedical, and event medical for the work that does not fit the everyday clinic pattern.

This is one field with real consequences, not a label. It decides whether the Super Guarantee may be owed to you, whether a given engagement helps or hurts your Personal Services Income position, and how a workplace service fee feeds your take-home. See agency vs direct billing for how the economics compare.

Here is the part that surprises people coming from other systems. In Australia, Sessional treats you as an independent contractor who self-invoices every shift, so the full agreed rate of each shift feeds your tax reserve. There is no separate agency-net or PAYG-withheld figure to enter on a shift, because the reserve is built from your contracted rate, not from a payslip after deductions.

What does change the reserve is your business structure. A sole trader is taxed as an individual (income tax plus Medicare levy, less the low income tax offset); a Pty Ltd company is taxed at the base company rate. Sessional runs the reserve once per structure so each slice hits the right tax model, then shows the recommended set-aside on your earnings dashboard. If you are GST-registered, the reserve also carries the GST component (one eleventh of GST-inclusive income), which matters once your turnover passes the $75,000 threshold.

When you invoice a workplace directly, Sessional tracks the invoice from issued to paid and chases it if it goes overdue. But agency, casual, and bank shifts pay you by payslip, not by an invoice you raised, so there is no invoice to track. For those, you mark each delivered shift against what actually landed:

• Paid correct: the payment matched what you expected.
• Paid short: it came up light. Record the amount you actually received so the gap is visible.
• Not paid yet: still outstanding.

Open short and unpaid shifts surface in one list across every agency and hospital you work for, which is the cross-employer view no single payslip portal gives you. The full mechanics live in the pay-flagging guide.

Super is the other thing that goes missing. For agency and certain direct engagements the Super Guarantee can be owed to you under the labour-hire rules, even though you may also invoice. Sessional reads each shift's income source, estimates whether SG is likely owed, covered through PAYG, or fact-pattern dependent, and compares it against the SG actually paid against that shift to show the unpaid gap worth chasing. See the Super Guarantee tracker.

Healthcare is not always worked at your registered scope. Nurses pick up assistant-in-nursing shifts, paramedics pick up patient-transport shifts, allied-health professionals work as assistants. You can record the role worked on each shift from the session form, and the shift carries that role so your rate reporting reflects what you were actually paid for. The role context is a free-form label, so if the dropdown does not list your exact role you can type your own (up to 40 characters). It does not change your profile profession, your AHPRA registration, or your directory listing, and it does not imply your registration covered an unregulated role, so always confirm your indemnity before taking out-of-scope work.

If you run some shifts as a sole trader and others through a Pty Ltd company in the same year, the reserve calculation already accounts for that by running per business structure. Your profile sets the default; the dashboard shows the headline reserve with the structure applied. For the wider tax picture, including how PSI can reshape it, read the tax planning guide.