Cake decorator customer story
Cakes on Carthew, Townsville QLD Linda Jaworski, Owner, Cake Decorator, and accidental payroll expert.
Cakes on Carthew has been part of Townsville for 20 years. Linda started with her husband in Ingham, just the two of them, no staff. When they moved to Townsville with three-year-old twins and a three-week-old baby, they built the business under the house while three generations of family lived under one roof.
Today Linda runs a tight team of three, two casuals and one permanent part-time, turning out cheesecakes and decorated birthday cakes from her own space.
She does not want to be a payroll expert. She decorates cakes.
Linda had been using her previous software since she first took on staff. She knew it well. Pay runs were quick because she had everything set up. But payday was never really just the pay run.
After running wages she would manually log into her banking, type in the figures, and hope she got them right.
"There have been a number of times where it's $517 and I've typed in $571. You get to the end of the quarter and your accountant says I have a discrepancy."
Then came the end of quarter. Super reports. ATO reports. Separate logins. Separate steps. All of it adding up to time Linda did not have.
Linda did not choose to change. Her previous software wound down and PaySauce stepped in. The transition was handled carefully, no sudden changes, no pressure to do anything differently straight away.
"Not having to completely change a payroll right there and then made it much easier."
Anna from PaySauce walked Linda through the new system, patient, accessible, and always available when something did not make sense.
"You've been very accessible. So helpful. There's just been no reason to change at all."
Linda runs her pay run. That is it. Tax goes. Super goes. Wages go. All in the background, without her touching a thing.
"I am doing my pays, and at the same time I am paying my tax, I am paying my super, without me even knowing it. That's just happening in the background."
The manual banking step is gone. The quarterly scramble is gone. The risk of typing $517 as $571 is gone.
"It's not only quicker in the instance of doing the pays, but in the whole quarter it's going to be quicker. And there's less human error. Because the computer is doing my super, your program is doing my tax, and there's no option for $517 to become $571."
Linda already knew Payday Super was coming. She was not worried.
"I am going to like not having to deal with that at the end of the quarter. It's different. But it's not a bad difference. As long as I do my payroll the way I'm supposed to, everything else just happens automatically. Which is just one less thing for me to do."
She also had something clear to say to business owners nervous about paying tax and super with every pay run instead of holding it.
"The money's not yours anyway. It already belongs where it's supposed to be. Being able to pay it in smaller amounts means that in the future, if something gets tight, you're not facing a big chunk of money suddenly disappearing. It's just quietly going week by week."
Linda is not someone who wanted to become a payroll expert. She decorates cakes. That was always the point.
What surprised her most was not how fast PaySauce was. It was how invisible it became.
"It's happening in the background and I'm not doing the wrong thing, because it just won't let me. That's my most favourite thing."
After twenty years in business, three staff, and a lot of late nights, that is what sorted looks like. Not a big dramatic change. Just payday quietly doing what it is supposed to do, every single week, while Linda gets back to the cakes.
"You get out the other side of learning something new and you go, can't even imagine still doing this with a pen and paper."
Twenty years in business. Three staff. One pay run a week. Zero quarterly super panic. And a lot more time to decorate cakes.