Our Story

If you've ever stared at a complex payslip, trying to figure out which income actually counts — and then spent the next hour running through multiple lender calculators — you already understand why AutoCalc exists.

AutoCalc began with Peter Liu, a practising Sydney mortgage broker, and a team of working brokers — people who live this problem before they try to solve it. Between us, we've spent decades sitting across the table from clients, deal after deal. And despite all that experience, one problem never went away:

Australian payslips are complicated — and every lender reads them differently.

A hospital nurse, a mining contractor, and a corporate employee can all earn strong incomes — but through completely different structures. Overtime, allowances, bonuses, YTD calculations, annualisation rules — and then on top of that, each lender applies its own policy.

Even for experienced brokers, a complex payslip could take 20–30 minutes just to interpret correctly. A full borrowing capacity comparison? Easily an hour. And every year, the newer brokers we mentored asked the same questions: How do I read this payslip? Which income does this lender accept? What's the correct shading rule here?

That's when it became clear: this isn't a broker problem — it's an industry problem.

By 2025, document-understanding technology had reached a point where it could reliably read a payslip and pull structured data out of it — turning hours of manual annualisation into seconds, while leaving every figure visible for the broker to verify. That's when Sam Zhan joined Peter as co-founder — a senior engineering leader with deep experience in financial systems. He saw the gap immediately, and built the product that closes it.

“Brokers are doing highly skilled work — but a large portion of their time is spent on processes that should already be automated.”

Together, we built AutoCalc.

Here's the truth nobody in this space likes to admit: building a serviceability calculator isn't hard. Anyone can build one.

Building 25 of them — each one matching that lender's own assessment tool to the dollar — is brutally hard. Overtime shading, HEM tables, negative gearing, HECS, self-employed add-backs, essential-worker policies: every single lender handles every single one of these differently. The differences are subtle, undocumented, and exactly where borrowing capacity is won or lost.

And lenders never stand still. Rates move. Policies change. Banks ship new versions of their calculators without warning. An accurate calculator that's three months stale is a wrong calculator — so we treat keeping up as seriously as getting it right in the first place.

We're brokers first, software people second. AutoCalc isn't something we built to sell — it's something we built to use. Every release is pressure-tested against the way real Australian payslips actually behave, before it reaches you. When a number looks off, we're the first ones it burns — so we check it against the lender's own calculator, find the gap, and fix it.

Our rule is simple: if our own brokers don't love it, it doesn't ship.