Your 2025 End-of-Year HR Checklist: 7 Steps to a Smooth Wrap-Up

As the end of the year approaches, the pressure on HR departments across Australia shifts from daily operations to a complex administrative and compliance sprint. For HR leaders, this period—which encompasses everything from performance reviews and compliance audits to payroll finalisation—often feels less like a wrap-up and more like a tightrope walk.

The difference between a frantic December and a smooth transition into January often comes down to one thing: a comprehensive checklist and the system to back it up.

Here are the 7 essential steps to ensure your organisation closes the year cleanly, reduces administrative stress, and sets the stage for a strategic 2026.

1. Audit Your Leave Balances and Accruals

The Task: Ensure all employee annual leave, sick leave, and long service leave balances are accurate and up-to-date before the final payroll run. This is a critical compliance checkpoint, especially concerning annual leave liabilities on your balance sheet.

The Pain Point: If you rely on basic HR systems or separate spreadsheets for leave, reconciliation becomes a manual nightmare. The average payroll error costs Australian businesses approximately $35 billion annually (Australian Payroll Association, qtd. in EmployeeConnect Blog).

The Growth Insight: A future-proof HRIS—one built as a service, not an off-the-shelf product—offers customisable accrual rules that automatically calculate complex award conditions, eliminating manual auditing entirely.

2. Finalise and Lock Down Payroll Data

The Task: Identify and resolve all outstanding payroll anomalies, errors, or manual adjustments for the year. This includes correctly coding any fringe benefits tax (FBT) items, final expense claims, and end-of-year bonuses.

The Pain Point: Discrepancies between basic HR and payroll platforms (a common result of shallow integration) require days of manual data matching. Relying on manual processes means that each payroll error costs an average of $291 to correct (Lano.io).

The Growth Insight: Strategic businesses demand deep, two-way integration. The end of the year is when you most acutely feel the cost of systems that don’t speak fluently to your primary payroll and finance software.

3. Prepare for Compliance Reporting (FWO & WHS)

The Task: Ensure all mandatory records are consolidated for end-of-year reporting obligations, including Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) records and Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) incident data.

The Pain Point: Relying on siloed systems or paper records means crucial data for compliance is scattered, turning an audit into a scramble. Failure to comply can be financially severe: Fair Work non-compliance penalties can reach $93,900 per breach for businesses and $18,780 for individuals (Austpayroll).

4. Conduct a Data Integrity Cleanse

The Task: Review your core employee records for consistency. Check employee contact details, bank details, emergency contacts, and position titles. This prevents simple errors from cascading into critical issues (like failed payments) in the new year.

The Pain Point: Basic systems often lack strong data validation tools, meaning garbage in equals garbage out. Each manual HR data entry task has an average estimated cost of $4.78 (Ernst & Young), a figure that climbs steadily each year as labour costs rise.

The Growth Insight: Data integrity should be guaranteed by the platform’s configuration, not reliant on manual checks. A service-led HRIS ensures custom fields and data structures are consistent across the entire organisation.