Sponsored: this post is brought to you by Onesto.

The most expensive line in your budget isn't wages. It's churn.

Every support worker who leaves sets off the same chain: roster gaps, overtime for the staff who stay, recruitment hours, onboarding, and weeks before a replacement works independently. The structure is identical at every provider — replacing people costs multiples of keeping them. So the rational question isn't whether retention matters. It's which retention levers cost less than the turnover they prevent.

Four levers, one platform

1. Earned wages, on demand. Staff can draw already-earned pay early instead of reaching for payday loans or wearing a cash-flow crunch for a fortnight. It plugs into Xero with no payroll rebuild. Watch how it works in two minutes: How to Access Earned Wages Flexibly with Onesto

The two-minute earned-wages walkthrough from Onesto.

2. Shop and Save. Cashback of up to 10% across more than 350 partner retailers in Australia and New Zealand — enough, by Onesto's reckoning, to save members over $100 a month on everyday spending. This is money back on spending staff were doing anyway, which is why it lands differently from a voucher scheme: the benefit is visible on the first shop.

A slice of the 80-plus retailers and 100-plus restaurants where members earn cashback.

Discounted gift cards extend the same idea to gifting — buy and send for birthdays and holidays at member prices, straight from the app.

Gift cards at member prices, bought and sent from the phone.

3. Learn. Bite-sized courses on financial literacy and wellness. Financial stress follows support workers home and comes back to work with them; structured, accessible education treats the cause rather than the symptom.

4. Rewards and Recognition. A digitised awards process — no manual purchasing, no postage — so recognising good work actually happens instead of living on a to-do list.

Why enterprises already trust it

This isn't a startup promise. Village Roadshow's CEO calls Onesto "the single best employee benefit introduced at Village Roadshow of all times," reporting 89% of surveyed employees saying it reduced their financial stress. Bapcor runs its workforce benefits on it. Autobarn, Burson, Stannards, Uniting and dozens more Australian employers issue it to their teams. The company is led by a Columbia Business School alumnus and earned a Fast Company honorable mention in 2023.

The same enterprise-grade platform — the one large employers pay enterprise rates for — is available to smaller Australian companies at a fraction of that cost, distributed to your team through you as the employer.

Getting started as an employer

Rollout runs through you: staff get the app from the App Store or Google Play, enrolment is handled centrally, and the Xero integration means payroll stays exactly as it is. Teams typically start with a short demo — a walkthrough of how the pieces fit a business like yours — then switch on what they want first. Most employers lead with earned wages and Shop and Save, since those two show value on the first payday and the first shop, then layer Learn and Rewards once usage is habitual. If that's your team, book a call or explore the platform at onesto.co.

Running your own numbers

Take your roster size, your hires last year, and the weeks each hire took to work independently. Then ask what one retained support worker a quarter is worth against a benefits layer your staff feel every week. For most providers the arithmetic resolves quickly — and if it doesn't for yours, you've spent an hour confirming it rather than a quarter discovering it.

To talk through what it would look like for your team, book a call with Onesto or explore the platform at onesto.co.