For six years, Allison Simmons ran the payroll at Merbein Mushrooms, a Victorian mushroom grower. Every week, she altered a few employees' bank details so a slice of their pay landed in accounts she controlled, then topped that up by inflating her own pay too. By the time anyone noticed, she'd taken more than $1.1 million (Source: Human Resources Director).

Alarmingly, none of it showed up as anything unusual. On the bank statement, the whole pay run was one line. It was probably something like "PAYROLL BATCH: 80 TXNS, $71,240.00." Easily reconciled, ticked off and filed. Nobody was checking individual payslips against individual payments, because the ABA file made that basically impossible.

At architectural firm Hassell, payroll manager Sally Ann Woodall ran a different version of the same trick for a decade. She kept ex-employees on the books and paid herself over $737,000 across more than 200 transactions, each one indistinguishable from a normal pay run line (Source: Matthews Folbigg Lawyers).

Both frauds worked because of the structural feature of the ABA file itself.

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An ABA file bundles every employee's pay into one instruction to the bank, one line in your feed. Bookkeepers love this for the reconciliation, and we get it: matching one number is faster than matching eighty.

But bundling payments together costs you visibility. A single bulk transaction tells you nothing about where the money actually went. If one payment fails, whether it's a wrong BSB or a closed account, you're untangling it from the other forty-six by hand. And if someone with access to the payroll system wants to add a name, or keep paying someone who's left, the batch total is exactly where that hides.

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Every payment on the New Payments Platform clears in seconds, on its own, carrying its own reference. There's no bundling step, no single instruction covering eighty people. Real-time rails work this way by design, moving money one transaction at a time, which is what makes real-time settlement and fraud detection possible in the first place.

Practically, that means every employee gets their own line on your feed, every pay run, with each one carrying a reference you set. A phantom employee doesn't get to hide inside a total anymore. They show up as their own named, timestamped transaction.

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We know what you're thinking. Two hundred and fifty employees means two hundred and fifty lines on your feed instead of one. That sounds like a bank rec nightmare.

It doesn't have to be, and it comes down to two changes.

1. Give payroll its own bank account

Make this account separate from day-to-day spending. Every line in that account is a wage payment, so the audit trail is self-contained. If Fair Work ever comes knocking, you hand over the statements and the payslips and you're done.

2. Set up a bank rule

Every New Payments Platform payment carries a clean reference, employee name, pay period, whatever you choose, so a rule in your accounting software matches it to your wages clearing account automatically. You're confirming the rule ran, the same way you'd spot-check any other automated reconciliation (and you’re not having to scan 250 lines by eye).

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Australia's Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) is the system ABA files run on. Originally, it was targeted for retirement by 2030. While there is now no firm date for the changeover, plenty of businesses will be preparing by running both rails side by side for a while.

PayTo is already live for every Tanda payroll customer, at no extra cost. Pay runs go out directly from Tanda. That means there’s no file to export or upload to a banking portal, and you know within seconds whether a payment landed instead of waiting for the next business day.

If you're a signatory on your company's account, turning it on takes about five minutes.

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