Your Busiest Payout Weeks Are Coming. Who’ll Be on Shift?
It’s 11:40 pm on Boxing Day. The gaming room is full, the GM is on leave until the new year, and a patron has just won well over $5,000. The relief duty manager on tonight has handled one large payout this year. Maybe two.
None of that is unusual. It’s what the next six weeks look like in most venues: longer trading hours, leave cover, casuals picking up extra shifts and head office running on a skeleton crew.
Your AML/CTF obligations don’t change over the break. The person carrying them out often does.
Large Payouts Don’t Keep Office Hours
Recently we’ve published two Checkd case studies: The Oxford Hotel Bathurst, a regional hotel with 20 EGMs, and Inverell RSM Club, a community club with 64. Different venues, same pattern.
- At The Oxford, 64% of payouts happened outside standard office hours, and 36% landed on weekends.
- At Inverell, 1 in 4 payouts were created between midnight and 3 am.
- In Inverell’s first 30 days on Checkd, 7 different managers completed 12 payouts. That’s fewer than 2 each.
Large payouts tend to arrive when support is thinnest. Over Christmas and New Year, that gets harder again. The people who know the process best are more likely to be on leave, and the people covering for them are less likely to have done one recently.
The Risk Sits With the Person on Shift
Most venues have an AML/CTF program that’s been reviewed and signed off. The holiday risk isn’t in the folder. It’s whether a manager who last processed a large payout in September can get every step right at midnight, with patrons waiting and nobody to call. Every manual step is a point where something can slip: ID sighted but not recorded, screening run but not saved, paperwork filed somewhere nobody can find in March.
Five Things to Check Before December
None of these needs new software. They’re worth 30 minutes with your gaming and duty managers before the rush.
- Who’s authorised to complete large payouts over the break? Check your holiday roster against your authorised list, not just this week’s roster. If a relief manager on a late shift isn’t authorised, sort it out now, not on the night.
- Can each of them do a payout start to finish? Not “have they seen one done”. Walk each person through the full process, including screening and record-keeping.
- Is the process where the night manager will look? A program in the GM’s office doesn’t help at 1 am. A one-page step list kept where payouts are processed does.
- Who do they call if something doesn’t look right? Name a person and a number for every shift over the break, public holidays included. If the answer is the GM, check the GM’s leave dates.
- Could you find the record again? Pick a large payout from last month and time how long it takes to pull the full record: ID, screening result, approval and payment details. AML/CTF records need to be kept for seven years. If it takes more than a few minutes now, it won’t be quicker next year.
How Checkd Venues Handle It
At venues using Checkd, every large payout follows the same guided workflow, whoever starts it. ID is scanned and verified. AML and PEP screening runs automatically. A manager reviews and approves. A timestamped record is created and stored.
At Inverell, it takes about five minutes to go from starting a payout to submitting it for review since go-live. That’s what matters over the break. The relief manager doesn’t need to remember the sequence. They follow it. And if they get stuck at 1 am, Checkd’s support team is Australian-based and available 24/7.
“The first payout was much easier than expected. Checkd walks you through each step, so it felt almost foolproof.”
Kaitie Boney, Business Administration Manager, Inverell RSM Club
Find Your Weak Spots Before the Rush
If you want a quick read on where your own process could slip over the break, we’ve built a short quiz: the Manual Payout Exposure Map. Answer a few questions about how large payouts are handled at your venue, and you’ll see where your process is most exposed, whether it’s mostly manual, a mix of paper and digital, or mostly digital already. It takes a few minutes.
Take the Manual Payout Exposure Map quiz
As always, Checkd supports your venue’s gaming AML/CTF processes; it doesn’t replace your program or constitute compliance advice. It ensures the process you’ve already signed off on is followed the same way, every time, whoever is on shift.
