How to Get Pay & Bill Right the First Time
Your pay and billing system just has to work. Clients need to be invoiced, accurately and on time, and the only reason to pay a worker late or incorrectly is if you never want to see them again. Unlike your sales and recruiting processes, where success is measured in degrees, pay and bill often seems binary–either it’s working and the checks are going out on time, or it isn’t and something needs to be fixed.
Get Pay & Bill Right the First Time
Just because your pay and bill processes seem to be “working,” doesn’t mean that they are working well. As time goes on and you take on new clients and candidates, the requirements and pressures placed on your timekeeping, billing, and payroll solutions become increasingly complex. New client agreements with unique terms for rates and expenses, changing sales tax rates and permutations, projects and purchase orders; the number of small details that need to be managed keeps growing and growing.
The most common way to solve these problems is to have your pay/bill staff take on the responsibility of more manual tasks each pay and bill period. This inflating list of tasks ends up taking up all your staff’s time, and your headcount has likely increased as a result. On top of this, you’ve introduced more manual touch-points that present more opportunities for human error. Finally, this approach usually leads to your back office staff becoming the “problems resolution department,” since errors don’t get caught until you’re actually collecting revenue or paying workers. Going back and trying to identify the source of these errors becomes difficult–sometimes impossible–tangled up in the chain of manual tasks that connect all the way back up to the rates and timesheets on the placement itself.
Bullhorn Pay & Bill Solution
At Bullhorn, we are trying to solve this problem differently. Rather than make our users spend so much time at the end of the process when the invoices and paychecks are generated, we want to instead allow for pay/bill parameters to be set up at the client level in your applicant tracking system. With this approach, you can get your pay and bill right the first time, without relying on a list of manual fixes for every placement. You take the time to configure each of your client agreements in the system before actually sending anyone to work. Rates and rate cards, billing contact details, invoice templates and data grouping, even sales tax rates and exemptions – these are all entered into the process upstream on the client record. Then, when you create new job openings and then place candidates in them, the correct pay and bill terms can flow down and be enforced each step of the way.
Enforcing Margins
A big advantage of this approach is that you can also enforce margin and markup for each placement in the same way. If you have a minimum margin or markup that needs to be enforced at the time of placement, this system will allow you to do so, blocking the placement (or, alternatively, providing a warning) when the profitability of the placement does not meet the standards for your business. These can be applied at the client level if you want to enforce margin for a specific client, or at the job level if you only want it enforced on certain kinds of jobs.
Dating Parameters
At the same time, pay and bill parameters can all be effectively dated in our system. If a change to a client agreement is coming down the line, a new version of a rate card or billing configuration can be created with an effective date in the future, allowing for seamless pay and bill processing across multiple versions of an agreement.
Rules and Compliance
When combined with our time and expense capture and interpretation solution that maximizes timely approval and accuracy of time entry, this solution allows for a massive reduction in time that the billing and finance teams would otherwise spend hunting down and solving issues resulting from weak enforcement of pay/bill terms throughout the candidate lifecycle. We call it our “Rules and Compliance” solution, and it is integral to the new pay and bill functionality we offer.
So, how confident are you that your pay and bill software enforces compliance with client requirements and agreements accurately on its own? Are your regular recurring pay and bill processes getting bloated with manual tasks?
To learn more about pay and bill, check out our new solution, Bullhorn One
