Shift It vs Sweep - Tracking Your Pay vs Checking a Payslip

If you’ve been looking into apps that catch payslip errors, you’ve probably come across both Shift It and Sweep. They overlap in one specific area — checking whether you were paid correctly — but they approach it from completely different directions. Understanding that difference is the point of this post.

What Sweep does

Sweep is a payslip analysis tool built by Portable, an Australian technology company. You give it a payslip and it checks whether the figures on it are correct. It’s designed to catch underpayment retrospectively — after the pay run, after the money has hit your account.

One important scope limitation as of mid-2026: Sweep currently supports the General Retail Industry Award only. If you work in retail — supermarkets, fashion, electronics, department stores — it applies directly to your situation. If you work in nursing, hospitality, community services, healthcare, or any other sector, Sweep does not currently cover your award. The team has indicated broader award coverage is planned.

For retail workers specifically, the value proposition is clear: upload your payslip, find out if you were underpaid under the retail award, know what to claim back.

What Shift It does

Shift It approaches the problem from the other direction. It doesn’t wait for a payslip to arrive — it builds your pay figure from the ground up, using your actual shifts and your specific award or enterprise agreement.

The sequence looks like this:

1. Import your roster from your employer’s scheduling system, or enter shifts manually
2. Set your award (Nurses, SCHADS, Hospitality, FIFO, Fast Food, and more)
3. Pay Check calculates your expected pay for each shift — base rate, weekend loadings, night penalties, public holiday rates — as you go
4. When your payslip arrives, compare it against what Pay Check calculated

That last step is where Shift It and Sweep overlap. Both can tell you whether your payslip is wrong. The difference is that Shift It already has your shift record and your award-derived expected figure before the payslip exists. Sweep starts from the payslip itself and works backwards.

The reactive vs proactive problem

Payslip analysis tools have a structural limitation: they can only check what’s on the payslip. If your employer consistently miscodes a shift type, enters the wrong start time, or applies the wrong rate — a payslip-first tool can only flag the discrepancy between what’s on the document and the correct rate. It can’t tell you that a shift was miscoded before it was processed.

Shift It’s record is independent of your employer’s system. You logged what actually happened — when you started, when you finished, whether it crossed a weekend boundary, whether it was a public holiday. That’s the source of truth you compare against the payslip. Not the payslip compared against itself.

This matters most when the error is in the shift record, not just the rate. If your employer logged a 10-hour shift as 9 hours, a payslip analysis tool will see correct penalty rate applied to 9 hours and miss the error entirely. Shift It sees the discrepancy because your record says 10.

Feature comparison

Feature	Shift It	Sweep
Shift calendar	Yes	No
Roster import (spreadsheet, PDF, photo)	Yes	No
Multi-job support	Yes	No
Award-based pay calculation	Yes (Pro) — multiple awards	General Retail Industry Award only (currently)
Live pay tracking by the second	Yes (Pro)	No
Home screen widgets	Yes	No
Payslip underpayment check	Yes (Pro)	Yes (core feature)
Penalty rate handling	Yes (Pro)	Varies
Independent shift record	Yes	No — starts from payslip
iOS and Android	Yes	Web / check their site
UK support (NHS)	Yes	AU-focused

Who works multiple jobs or under multiple awards?

If you work across two employers — say, two hospitals on different enterprise agreements, or a casual hospitality job alongside a SCHADS role — you need a system that can separate those streams. Shift It handles this with multi-job support: each job has its own colour, its own award, and its own pay calculation. Your Coming Up view and your weekly earnings both separate correctly.

A payslip checker sees one payslip at a time. It has no view across jobs or pay periods unless you feed it each document separately.

The case for using both

There’s an honest case where you might use both tools. If you’re dealing with a complex underpayment dispute — especially one that predates when you started tracking shifts in Shift It — a dedicated payslip analysis tool can work through historical documents you no longer have shift records for.

But going forward, the smarter move is to maintain your own record. Not because payslip checkers are bad, but because your independent record is stronger evidence than a tool that reads the employer’s document. If you ever need to escalate to Fair Work, your independently logged shift data carries more weight than a discrepancy flagged by analysing the payslip in isolation.

Who should use which?

If you work in retail under the General Retail Industry Award, received a payslip you suspect is wrong, and don’t have a shift record, Sweep is worth trying. It’s free and purpose-built for that exact situation.

If you work in any other sector — nursing, community services, hospitality, healthcare, emergency services — Sweep does not currently cover your award. Shift It’s Pay Check does. And it builds the expected figure before the payslip arrives rather than auditing it after.

Award-based pay is complex. Weekend loadings, night penalties, public holiday rates, multi-employer pro-rata — none of it is straightforward to check manually. The shift workers who consistently catch underpayments are the ones who stop auditing after the fact and start tracking before it.