Pay and bill from a single time entry

The gap that costs you margin

Ask a staffing owner where money leaks and you will usually hear a version of the same story: a timesheet gets keyed into payroll on Monday, and then somebody re-keys it into the accounting system on Wednesday to produce the invoice.

Between Monday and Wednesday, things happen. A rate was updated in one system and not the other. Overtime was calculated against the pay rate but billed at straight time. Eight hours became eighty. A whole job site got missed and nobody noticed until the customer’s month-end reconciliation, by which point the customer is disputing an invoice you can no longer easily prove.

None of that is a discipline problem. It is a consequence of the same fact existing in two places.

One entry, two outputs

In Staffing Complete, the work order carries both numbers — what you pay and what you bill. Time is entered once against that order. The payroll run reads it at the pay rate; invoice creation reads the same entry at the bill rate.

The result is that a billing dispute is a conversation about hours, not a forensic exercise across two systems. When a customer questions an invoice line, the hours behind it are the same hours that produced somebody’s paycheck, and you can show them that.

Building and sending the invoices

Invoicing runs as a deliberate two-step so you can review before anything reaches a customer.

Step one — create. Review the billable items sitting inside orders and generate invoices from them. This is where you catch the missing approval, the wrong job site, and the assignment that ended on Wednesday but has hours on Thursday.

Step two — print and email. Send them, in a batch, in the format each customer expects. Reprint exists because customers lose invoices, and the reprint is the same document rather than a regenerated approximation of it.

Around those two steps:

• Manual invoices for charges that never came from a timesheet — conversion fees, direct hire placements, pass-through costs.
• National accounts for customers who need consolidated billing across branches while you keep branch-level attribution for margin reporting.
• Finance charges where your terms allow them, applied consistently rather than whenever somebody remembers.

Getting paid, and chasing the ones who do not

An invoice is not revenue until it clears, which is why accounts receivable sits in this workflow rather than off in an accounting silo.

Payments are entered and applied against invoices, with un-applied payments held visibly rather than absorbed into a balance nobody can explain. Auto payment post and A/R import handle the customers who pay in volume or send remittance files. Collections gives you the aging and the working list — who owes what, how old it is, and who spoke to them last.

This matters disproportionately if you are running daily pay. Paying workers the same day while collecting on net-30 terms puts your own balance sheet in the gap, and the only lever you have on the other side is billing sooner and collecting harder. Aging you can see is the starting point for both.

What sits on either side

Upstream, the hours come from time capture and the rates come from quotes and customer records in the front office. Downstream, the receipts, deposits, and journal entries land in the back office, and the margin picture across customers and branches shows up in reporting.