Hours get retyped because each system only sees part of the placement.
In most agencies the applicant tracking system knows the placement, the payroll provider knows the worker’s pay, the accounting system knows the client’s invoice, and the timesheet itself arrives as paper, a photo, a client email, or a VMS export. Someone in the back office reads each timesheet and types the hours into payroll, then types them again into invoicing, and the two versions rarely match perfectly.
The errors are predictable. Overtime is paid but not billed, a shift differential is billed at the wrong rate, a worker is paid for hours the client never approved, or an invoice goes out without the purchase order number the client requires. Each mistake is small, but together they erode margin and create disputes that take recruiters away from filling orders.
Automation starts by treating the approved timesheet as one record that feeds both payroll and invoicing. When the hours, the rates, and the approval travel together, payroll and billing can no longer disagree, and the back office moves from typing numbers to reviewing the few records that fail a check.
Pay and bill rates should come from the placement, not from memory.
Every placement in the ATS should carry the rules that turn hours into money: the pay rate, the bill rate or markup, overtime and double time rules, shift differentials, holiday rules, per diems, and any client-specific requirements such as a purchase order number or cost center. If these live in a recruiter’s head or a side spreadsheet, no timesheet process can be automated reliably.
Clean up the rate data before building anything. Look for placements with missing bill rates, expired rate agreements, and clients whose contracts specify different overtime treatment from the default. Agencies with light industrial, healthcare, and professional desks often find each desk uses a different set of rules, which is fine as long as the rules are written down and stored with the placement.
Once the rates are reliable, the software can calculate gross pay and the invoice amount from the same approved hours, apply state and client rules consistently, and show the margin on every line. That calculation becomes the single number both payroll and finance rely on, and changes to a rate are recorded with who made them and why.
Clients should approve hours in a portal or a signed link.
The most useful change for many agencies is moving client approval out of email. A client portal lists each supervisor’s workers and their submitted hours for the pay period, with any overtime highlighted, and the supervisor approves, adjusts with a reason, or rejects each timesheet. Supervisors who rarely sign in can approve through a secure link sent by email or text.
Workers can submit hours through a mobile form or a time clock integration, and the portal shows the supervisor exactly what was submitted. Keeping the worker’s submission, the supervisor’s approval, and any adjustment on one record gives the agency a clear answer when a client disputes an invoice or a worker disputes a paycheck.
Where clients use a vendor management system such as SAP Fieldglass or Beeline, approval happens inside the VMS instead. In that case the software reads approved hours from the VMS feed or export on a schedule, matches them to placements, and flags any timesheet that is missing, unapproved, or different from what the worker submitted.
Post the approved record to payroll and invoicing, and route exceptions to a person.
With approved hours and reliable rates, the software can post payroll entries to ADP, Paychex, or the staffing platform’s payroll module, and create invoices in QuickBooks, NetSuite, or Sage Intacct. Invoices can be grouped the way each client expects: by worker, by location, by cost center, or as a consolidated bill with supporting detail attached.
Not every record should flow through untouched. Unapproved overtime, a rate that differs from the placement, a worker whose credentials expired during the pay period, or a missing purchase order number should stop the record and place it in an exception queue. Each exception needs a clear reason and a person responsible for resolving it before payroll closes.
Reconciliation completes the loop. After each run, compare hours paid with hours billed by client and desk, list any differences, and confirm that every approved timesheet reached both payroll and an invoice. This report gives finance confidence in the automation and catches problems in the integration before they reach workers or clients.
Start with one desk and one payroll run, then extend.
Pick a desk with steady volume and a handful of clients, such as a light industrial branch, and automate its full flow from submitted hours to payroll and invoice. Run it alongside the current process for a pay period or two, compare the results line by line, and fix the rules that disagree before switching the manual process off.
Then add the harder cases one at a time: healthcare desks with shift differentials and credential checks, clients that approve through a VMS, and professional placements billed on different terms. Each addition brings new rules and formats, so treat them as separate steps, each tested rather than one large cutover across the whole agency.
Baybloom builds these flows around the ATS, payroll, and accounting systems an agency already uses, starting with the desk where retyped hours cause the most trouble. Whoever does the work, the principle is the same: capture hours once, approve them once, calculate pay and bill from the placement, and let people handle only the exceptions.
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