Pricing
Pricing built for staffing margins
Staffing runs on thin margins, and software priced per seat quietly taxes you for growing. Here is how we think about it, and what shapes the number for your agency.
The short version
Staffing Complete is priced as a fitted arrangement for your agency, not as a per-seat subscription and not as a catalogue of modules you assemble. There is one platform, and you use the parts of it you need.
The reason we do not publish a price is that a single figure would be wrong for most of the people who read it. A twelve-person office running weekly payroll and a four-branch group running daily pay across three FEINs are genuinely different engagements. What we can tell you is what goes into the number and what you are not charged extra for.
What is included
Carvin Software’s stated position since 2004 has been not to charge clients for every request, support call, or new feature — because staffing offices run on small margins and unpredictable software bills make that worse.
- The platform itself — front office, back office, and payroll
- Training for your team, not a per-session professional services line
- New client onboarding and implementation support
- Support from people who understand staffing operations
- Product documentation covering every module
- Software updates as they are released
What shapes the number
How many people you pay
The volume of field employees running through payroll is the main driver, because that is what the system is actually doing work for.
How many offices and entities
A single-branch agency and a five-branch, three-FEIN group are different configurations with different support surfaces.
Which parts you use
An agency that processes payroll only is a different engagement from one running billing, A/R, A/P, general ledger, and tax filing.
What you are migrating from
Bringing over customers, employees, rates, and opening balances from an existing system is a bigger piece of work than starting clean.
The cost that is easy to miss
When agencies compare staffing software they usually compare licence fees, which is the smaller half of the picture. The larger half is what it costs to run a stack that does not talk to itself.
The common arrangement is an applicant tracking system at the front, a payroll bureau in the middle, and an accounting package at the back, with a person whose actual job is moving data between them. That person re-keys timesheets into billing, reconciles what the bureau withheld against what the ledger says, and rebuilds the year-end figures every January. Their salary is part of your software cost, and so is every billing dispute that starts with the same timesheet existing in two systems.
The case for a single platform is not that the licence is cheaper. It is that one time entry drives both the paycheck and the invoice, so the reconciliation work stops existing.
Worth being straight about the other direction too: if you are running a professional or executive search desk where sourcing is the bottleneck and payroll is simple, a recruiting-first product may fit you better. Staffing Complete is built for agencies whose difficulty is on the pay, bill, and compliance side.
Get the actual number
Tell us your headcount, how many branches you run, and what you are using now. You will get a straight answer, not a discovery sequence.
Pricing questions
Why are there no prices on this page?
Because a single published number would be wrong for most agencies who read it. Staffing Complete is sold as a fitted arrangement rather than a self-serve subscription, and the honest version of pricing is a short conversation about your headcount, branches, and what you are moving from. We would rather tell you the real number on a call than publish one that turns out not to apply to you.
Is it priced per user?
Per-seat pricing is the dominant model in staffing software and it creates a bad incentive: agencies ration logins to control cost, so branch managers share accounts and recruiters work in spreadsheets rather than in the system. We would rather your whole team be in the software. Talk to us about how your agency is structured and we will explain how that shapes the number.
Are modules priced separately?
Staffing Complete is one platform of 17 modules that share the same records, not a catalogue you assemble. The reason the payroll run and the customer invoice always agree is that they read the same time entry — pricing the pieces apart would work against the thing that makes it useful.
What does implementation involve?
Getting your customers, employees, rates, and opening balances in, and configuring offices, tax jurisdictions, workers compensation classes, accrual plans, and user permissions. Training and onboarding are part of the relationship rather than a separate line item, and the documentation wiki covers every module in detail.
Is there a free trial?
There is a free demo rather than a self-serve trial. Payroll software is not something you can meaningfully evaluate by clicking around an empty sandbox — what tells you whether it fits is watching it handle your pay frequencies, your bill rates, and your compliance obligations. That is what the demo is for.
See a daily payroll run in your own numbers
A short, unscripted walkthrough of the parts of Staffing Complete you actually need. No per-seat sales pitch.