Playbook, recruitment agency
Client billing questions, and the terms of business behind them
Recruitment invoices confuse clients for a structural reason: a temporary invoice is generated by somebody else's approved timesheet, and a permanent fee is triggered by a start date rather than by delivery of anything. So a hiring manager looking at a charge is often asking what generated it rather than disputing it. The terms of business answer nearly all of that, and unlike almost everything else in this trade, they are written down and not confidential.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for billing and invoices holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The invoice is produced by an approved timesheet rather than by the agency's own record of work done, so a query about a charge is often a query about somebody's approval.
- A permanent placement fee has a trigger and a set of conditions attached (start date, rebate period, temp to perm terms) that behave nothing like a normal service invoice.
- The person querying is a hiring manager or a finance team rather than a candidate, which makes this the one page on the site written for the client side of the desk.
- Rebate and guarantee terms are the most consequential clause in the relationship and are almost never read until somebody leaves, which is exactly when this question arrives.
How it arrives
- what are your fees for permanent placements
- what is your rebate period if someone leaves
- why does this invoice not match the timesheet
- when do you invoice for a temporary worker
- what are your payment terms
- how does temp to perm work if we want to keep them
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your terms of business in summary | Permanent fee basis, when it becomes payable, payment terms, temp to perm arrangements, and notice terms. Clients ask before they will brief a role, and a hiring manager who cannot get the terms quickly briefs somebody else. |
|---|---|
| Rebate or guarantee terms and their conditions | The period, how it tapers if it does, and every condition on it, including payment of the original invoice on time. Clients discover the conditions at the worst moment, and publishing them is better for the relationship than winning the argument later. |
| How temporary invoicing works | The timesheet cycle, who approves, when invoices are raised, what a charge rate includes, and how a query on hours is resolved. Nearly every temporary invoice query is really a timesheet approval question in disguise. |
| Who handles billing queries and what they need | The address or contact for invoice queries, the reference to quote, and the response time. Finance teams query in bulk near month end and a routing answer is worth more to them than an explanation. |
The reply
Temporary invoices are raised from the timesheets your managers approve in the period, so a difference between an invoice and what you expected usually traces back to which shifts were approved and when. Permanent fees are invoiced on the agreed basis once the candidate starts, and the rebate terms and the conditions attached to them are set out in our terms of business. I cannot open your account or any individual invoice, so leave your name, email and the invoice number and our accounts team will go through it with you.
It explains the mechanism that produced the invoice rather than defending the amount, which is what a finance team is actually asking. Naming the rebate conditions rather than only the period is deliberate, since the conditions are what get disputed. Asking for the invoice number makes the handover actionable rather than the start of a longer exchange.
Where it stops
The trigger. The client refers to a specific invoice, a named worker's hours, or a placement they want the fee position on.
I cannot see invoices, timesheets or any individual placement, so this needs our accounts team. Leave your name, email and the invoice number and they will come back to you with the detail.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never confirm the hours a named worker submitted or was paid for.
- Never say whether a rebate applies in a particular case.
- Never say a fee will be reduced, waived or credited.
- Never discuss the charge rate or margin applied to a named worker.
Questions
- Should the assistant talk about rates and margins?
- It can state your published fee basis and terms. It should not discuss the charge rate or margin on a named worker, because that sits between the agency and the client on one side and the agency and the worker on the other, and neither wants it recited by a widget.
- Can it quote our permanent fees?
- It can quote the published terms, including the fee basis and the rebate period with its conditions. What it should not do is negotiate or imply flexibility, because a hiring manager will hold you to the version they were told first.
- How do we keep client answers away from candidates?
- Keep the terms of business as a clearly separate document from the candidate pages, with distinct vocabulary, and check the citations on early conversations. The material is the control here, not the configuration.
Keep reading
- Everything for a recruitment agencyTwo audiences on one website. Process, payroll and compliance questions are answerable, application outcomes never are.
- Handling billing and invoices in generalInvoice copies, tax numbers, purchase order references. Nearly all of it is account specific, so the honest handling is process plus a clean handover.
- Erasure requests from candidates, and where they have to landA CV holding is exactly what erasure rights were written for. How the assistant routes the request and separates it from unsubscribing.
- Which side of the desk is asking, and why it decides everythingTwo audiences, two inboxes and one confidentiality wall between them. The handover starts by working out which side of the desk is typing.
- The word fees means two opposite things on a recruitment siteOne site, two prices. A candidate is never charged, and a client wants a percentage of salary or a margin inside an hourly rate.
Try it on your own material
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