This is the story of a single number — and what it takes to never be surprised by it.
A new enterprise agreement has arrived at Meridian Care.
Somewhere inside it is a number that now governs what people must be paid. It is not in a dashboard, or a database.
It is buried on page 146 of a PDF.
Schedule J. Minimum hourly rates, per role and level. And two employees are already below it.
This is the result. One pay-floor alert. Two employees below the minimum that applies to them.
A. Nguyen is on twenty dollars an hour. The agreement requires twenty-one thirty-four. The reason is visible in the row — not hidden behind a score or a summary.
Now let's rewind — and see how Strata knew, and why nobody has to take that answer on trust.
Before that — one more result, and it matters just as much.
One employee's role has no matching minimum in the agreement. Strata reports it: not enough data. It does not quietly turn missing information into compliance.
In a system making consequential decisions, knowing when not to claim certainty is a feature.
So how did Strata know? Rewind to the day the evidence arrived.
It starts here: the agreement, the payroll export and the employee register — together in one knowledge base.
Strata reads each source, finds the structure inside it, and keeps the original evidence attached to what it learns.
That matters because the rule and the payroll record must stay connected to where they came from — so the answer can be checked later.
These are payroll records, employee details and enterprise agreements. None of them needs to leave Meridian's environment — everything in this demonstration runs on one machine.
Meridian does not have to trade control of sensitive information for the ability to understand and act on it.
From those documents, Strata builds a working model of Meridian: its people, roles, pay rates and minimums — and how they connect.
A pay rate belongs to a role. A role is governed by a minimum. Employees hold roles.
And where a real relationship depends on more than one field — here, both classification and level — Strata keeps that relationship intact.
Simple data-quality rules ride along: employee IDs must be unique, rates must stay sensible.
The screen calls this an ontology. In practice it means you can move from a rate, to the rule that governs it, to the people affected — with no web of manual lookups.
Now we ask the question the compliance lead actually cares about: is any hourly rate below the minimum that governs it?
Watch: the hourly rate… below… the minimum from the agreement.
The limit is not copied into a setting — it is read from the agreement data itself. The rule you just watched being built is the rule Strata runs.
No code needed — Certant turns this into a safe, exact check. And every row gets one of three answers: in breach, compliant, or not enough data.
Let's run it now — normally it runs on a schedule.
The rule runs. One alert. Two employees.
A. Nguyen is on twenty dollars. M. Torres is on seventeen fifty. Both compared with the DDSO level-two minimum of twenty-one thirty-four — the reason travels with the result.
You can do the same comparison Strata just did. The minimum was not typed into the monitor. It came from the agreement.
The next question is the one a board member or payroll manager asks immediately: who is affected?
Strata does not ask a model to estimate. It follows the relationships in Meridian's data and counts the distinct records: one role, two employees.
The path is visible — from the pay rates, to the governing classification, to the people who hold it.
That turns 'we think the issue is contained' into 'here are the two people, and here is how we counted them'.
Finding the breach is only useful if the response is controlled. This action prepares the correction and carries it through a process Meridian designed.
The most important step is the deliberate pause: nothing consequential happens until a person signs off.
Strata automates the chasing, the preparation and the record-keeping. It does not automate accountability.
Back at the alert, the correction is ready — and already waiting for sign-off. Before anything changes, preview it.
Preview shows what would happen — without changing anything, anywhere.
Two people are affected — let's audit one of them properly.
Here is A. Nguyen's pay record: twenty dollars an hour — with its history, its relationships, and its sources in one place.
The twenty dollars is tied back to the payroll file — hover the source and there is the actual table it came from.
Follow the governing relationship, and there is the minimum that applies: twenty-one dollars, thirty-four cents.
And the minimum has its own source: page 146 of the agreement — the exact table from the cold open.
The record, the rule, the comparison, and the page. This is the moment the alert becomes defensible — nobody has to say 'the system says so'.
The resolution is ready — but not authorised. Notice who requested it: the watch rule itself.
The payroll manager sees exactly what will run before signing off. The plan is frozen — nothing can be quietly swapped in afterwards.
And the requester can never approve its own work.
A person approves — and only then does the agreed action execute.
The record now answers the uncomfortable questions before anyone asks them: who requested this, who approved it, what was authorised — and what happened.
Where an effect can be compensated, Strata applies the defined correction rather than pretending time can be reversed. And if an outcome is ever uncertain, the record says so — instead of inventing success.
This is not a one-off analysis. Payroll can send each weekly export straight into Strata.
Each delivery is checked, deduplicated and kept on file.
Here is this week's delivery, arriving now.
The model refreshes without anyone repeating the setup by hand. The compliance control continues as the underlying data changes.
But fresh never means uncontrolled. When a feed arrives in a shape Strata has not seen before, it does not silently reshape the live model.
The new structure waits here for a person to review it. Your model never changes behind your back.
The source does not have to be a document or a file feed. Strata can follow changes straight from a database — every insert, update and delete.
The same principle applies: new data can arrive continuously, but structural change still passes through review before it reshapes the live model.
The correction is through, the record is complete — and the issue is closed.
Monday morning now feels different. The agreement can change. Payroll can keep moving. New data can keep arriving.
But the rule, the people it affects, the evidence and the approval stay connected — all the way back to this page.
The audit may still come. The surprise does not have to.
Certant Strata. See it. Check it. Resolve it.