Are Paper Timesheets Becoming Obsolete For Recruitment Agencies?

With the temporary workers that you source technically being employees of your agency rather than the client business, it will be your company’s responsibility to ensure that such workers complete timesheets to validate the number of hours or days that they have worked for your client.

Furthermore, it is vital for the candidate to complete their timesheet correctly if they are to be paid correctly and on time.

However, in an age in which the way recruitment agencies do business is increasingly dominated by technology, certain protocols have become automated to assist in boosting efficiency, record-keeping and the smoothness of office operations. One such protocol that may appear to be becoming obsolete is the use of paper timesheets, and there are a number of reasons for that.

You might struggle to keep track of them

With the temporary workers for which your agency has responsibility not working on your own site, it can be a huge issue to keep track of paper timesheets; they can be easily lost and if handled too much, can even become illegible.

Inaccuracies can be common

Your payroll administrators may be all too familiar with employees complaining to them that they haven’t been paid for all of the hours they’ve worked; however, there can also be instances of employees being paid for hours they didn’t work. It’s easy and quick to alter paper timesheets, so if your agency isn’t properly monitoring this, it could cost you a lot of money over time.

They can be notorious time-wasters  

It can take a lot of time for an employee to complete a paper timesheet, particularly if they haven’t touched it all week. You would ideally prefer temporary workers sourced by your agency to focus as much of their time as possible on the core tasks required of them by the client business.

They don’t make economical or ecological sense

It’s easy to forget just how much the sheer expense of paper, ink and copying timesheets can accumulate over time. Your agency may come to see its paper timesheets as a waste of paper that unnecessarily adds thousands of pounds to its costs every year.

There are more modern and sophisticated solutions on the market

Today, many digital and online systems are becoming available and widely used, effectively keeping any agencies still using paper timesheets in a time-warp.

That’s why it may interest you to learn that here at TBOS, we work with a highly regarded provider of online timesheets, and can therefore assist in setting up an online system whereby candidates login and enter their timesheets and the client then authorises them.

However, we can also help if your agency is accustomed to using scanned/faxed signed timesheets, setting up an ‘accounts@’ email address for your agency so that timesheets will go into a specific inbox in readiness for processing into invoices. Such a system can serve as an invaluable way of modernising your company’s current use of paper timesheets so that they aren’t rendered obsolete.

Why not get in touch with the TBOS team now about our acclaimed recruitment payroll services and related back office expertise by calling 0345 504 6333?


Emma Parkins

Written by Emma Parkins

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