For many recruitment businesses, the pressures of running their own ‘Back-Office’ hits hardest when they’re least able to cope, typically during a period of growth, a compliance scare or an unwanted audit.
Something often compounded by the fact that ‘Finance’ is often undertaken by the Recruitment Manager or MD in the early days, curtailing further the projected potential sales effort and growth.
I’ve met with literally hundreds of recruitment firms over the years and whilst most recognise the need for a professional Pay and Bill solution that scales with the business, few have the budget or vision to define what that might look like during the fledgling months of a recruitment start-up.
There is much to consider when running your own recruitment business, but in order to be truly scalable, compliant and avoid throttling your sales effort defining your ‘Pay and Bill’ requirements early will pay dividends in the future.
A decent Pay and Bill solution is worth its weight in gold and could arguably offer a bigger return on investment than a sales CRM. A small team can manage huge volumes of timesheets and invoices (read: you don’t need full-time staff) and a decent system will allow you to manage the entire process, from importing placements from your CRM (when the placement is made AND when it’s amended), centrally processing timesheets (from Excel, Paper, Digital and Online Sources), adding them to bespoke Invoice layouts (that you design to meet your client’s requirements) and posting to the Accounts/Payroll/3rd parties of your choice.
OK, so Pay and Bill software lacks the sex appeal, but what’s sexier than a business that can scale from 10 to 200 temps or contractors a week without the need to hire an additional member of the Finance team?
With so many recruitment businesses getting dragged back into the nitty-gritty of running a weekly payroll manually, typically relying on a plethora of Excel spreadsheets, and admin staff duplicating the data further, is your ability to scale not your greatest competitive advantage?
The recruitment Industry is built on data and intellectual property. You have no ‘product’ to sell yet when Excel is at the heart of your back-office, are you not setting yourself up for pain?
WHY IS IT THAT THE RECRUITERS GET THE SHINY SALES SYSTEMS, AND THE FINANCE TEAM MAKE DO WITH EXCEL AND EXTRA STAFF COVERING THE CRACKS?
The painful truth is that for many agency start-ups the growth in the early days is hamstrung by the day-to-day pressures of ‘getting payroll and invoices done’, but things can and should be different.
Being able to get payroll done in one day isn’t something to be celebrated. You should be able to offer a daily payroll and charge the temps for a sub. Likewise, Purchase Orders shouldn’t be something ‘processed’, it could be a service you offer and charge for.
At Voyager I’ve seen hundreds of agency startups flourish, only to hit the glass ceiling of temps & contractors and their drive get stuck in 2nd gear – they never reach their potential. If you’re positioning for growth in 2019, don’t neglect your back office team.
Take a look and see if they’re red lining in 2nd gear.
Voyager Mid-Office is a software solution designed to automate and simplify your agency's pay and billing processes and as a result save you time, effort and money. If you’re outsourcing to a 3rd party company, make sure they’re lightening the administrative burden with Mid-Office Bureau.
What we do: Our recruitment software is simple, intuitive and will allow you to work faster and smarter.
It’s cost-effective, easy to implement and covers Perm, Contract and Temp sectors, plus Pay and Bill.
Blog is written by Paul.Thompson@VoyagerSoftware.com
