Pay-flagging for bank and agency shifts

If you pick up work through a public-hospital bank, a casual nursing pool, or one or more agencies, your pay does not arrive on a Sessional invoice you raised. It lands on payslips, often three or four a month, each from a different payroll system. The hospital bank has its own portal, the state health service has another, and every agency has theirs. Not one of them can tell you whether a single shift was paid correctly, paid short, or never paid at all, because none of them can see the others.

Pay-flagging closes that gap. You mark each delivered shift after you have checked the payslip line against it, and Sessional keeps the running cross-employer record. It is the kind of reconciliation a self-invoicing locum gets for free from their own invoices and auto-chasers, brought to the bank and agency workers who never had it.

Open your shifts list at /dashboard/sessions. On every shift that has been delivered, you will see a small pay-check pill beneath the shift, set to Not checkedby default. From there you choose one of three marks:

• Paid correctly: the payslip matched what you expected for the shift. One click, done.
• Paid short: the payslip came in below expectation. This opens a small form where you enter the amount you were actually paid (in AUD) and an optional note, for example "Saturday penalty loading missing". As you type, Sessional shows the live gap, so you can see exactly how much you are short by before you save.
• Not paid yet: you worked the shift but no payslip has landed for it. One click.

Once a shift is marked, the pill shows its status, and for a short-paid shift it also shows the amount received and the shortfall. A Reset link returns any shift to Not checked. There is no lock and no approval step: this is your own working record, and you can correct a mark the moment the real figure changes.

The Paid short form is an advisory tool, not an enforcement gate. Sessional shows the expected amount for the shift and computes the difference for you, but it never blocks you or files anything on your behalf. Work out what a shift should have paid from your award or enterprise agreement, including any penalty-rate loadings for nights, weekends, and public holidays, then compare that to the payslip line and record the figure.

• The amount you enter for a paid-short shift must be a positive number below the expected figure. If you were paid the full amount or more, use Paid correctly instead.
• There is a sanity ceiling of $99,999.99 on the amount field, which catches a stray extra digit before it can corrupt your records.
• The optional note is capped at 500 characters, enough to capture what was missing without becoming a case file.

The point of one record is that you can see the whole picture at once. Your dashboard home carries a "Needs your attention" row, and as soon as any shift is flagged Paid short or Not paid yet, a tile appears there counting them and linking straight back to your shifts list. A long-standing unpaid shift from one agency sits in the same count as a short-paid one from your hospital bank, so nothing slips off your radar just because it came from a different payroll.

That cross-employer total is something no single payslip portal can produce, because each portal only knows about its own pay run. It also feeds the same attention signalsyou rely on for unread notifications and open disputes, so your open pay questions live alongside the rest of your admin rather than in a separate spreadsheet.

Pay-flagging is available on any shift once it has reached Delivered, the point at which there is a real payslip to check it against. It is built for the way bank, agency, and PAYG work is paid: you are paid through someone else's payroll rather than through an invoice you raised yourself. You can flag historical shifts too, which is handy for backfilling a reconciliation across a quarter before you look at your earnings and reserve figures.

Every locum gets pay-flagging on every plan, including Free, because checking that you were paid for the work you did should never sit behind a paywall. If you are weighing up how your different income sources are taxed and reconciled, the difference between bank, agency, and direct work is covered inagency versus direct billing.