Staffing agencies sit at the center of a three-way relationship — the agency, the placed worker, and the client site — which creates timesheet failure modes that don’t show up in simpler employer-employee relationships.
Pitfall: client and worker report different numbers
When a client site and a placed worker each separately report hours, discrepancies are common and often hard to resolve after the fact — neither side necessarily lied, but two independently-reported numbers rarely match exactly, and reconciling them after the fact is friction that a single tracked source avoids entirely.
Pitfall: billing and pay calculated from different records
If client billing is calculated from one reported figure and worker pay from another, the agency’s margin on the placement becomes uncertain and hard to verify — both numbers should trace back to the same underlying tracked record.
Pitfall: workers placed at multiple sites get tangled together
A worker split across two client placements in the same week needs time tracked and billed separately per engagement — tools that don’t support clean multi-site tracking force manual splitting after the fact, another common source of billing errors.
Pitfall: no clear approval step before billing/pay is finalized
Timesheets that flow straight to billing and payroll without an agency review step remove the chance to catch an error before it becomes a client invoice or a paycheck — a lightweight approval step, even a fast one, is cheap insurance against downstream disputes.
The structural fix: one tracked record feeding both outcomes
Nearly all of these pitfalls trace back to the same root cause — client billing and worker pay calculated from two separately-reported numbers instead of one shared, tracked, approved record. Fixing that structural issue prevents most of the recurring problems at once, rather than patching each symptom separately.
A weekly timesheet workflow for staffing agencies
- Workers clock in at the client siteOn their phone, with location verification where agreed with the client.
- Exceptions flagged dailyMissed clock-outs, long shifts and unscheduled overtime.
- Client supervisor approvesApproval recorded with name and time.
- Agency reviews and locksAfter approval, edits go through a correction process.
- Pay and bill from one recordWorker pay and client invoice calculated from the same approved hours.
Bill rate, pay rate and gross margin
Agency margin depends on accurate hours, because every unrecorded or wrongly recorded hour shifts the gap between bill and pay.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Client bill rate | $32.00 per hour |
| Worker pay rate | $22.00 per hour |
| Employer costs (estimated at 15% of pay) | $3.30 per hour |
| Gross margin per hour | $6.70 (about 20.9% of bill rate) |
| Margin on 40 hours | $268.00 |
If overtime is paid at 1.5× ($33.00 plus costs) but billed at the standard rate because the contract did not cover it, every overtime hour loses money. Check contract overtime terms before workers are scheduled for long weeks.
Documents to keep for each placement
- Client contract with bill rates and overtime terms.
- Worker assignment confirmation with pay rate.
- Approved timesheets with approver name and date.
- Invoices and payroll records for the same periods.
Check figures with the overtime calculator and see staffing agencies.
Frequently asked questions
How do staffing agencies verify worker hours?
Workers clock in at the client site, often with location verification, and a client supervisor approves hours before pay and billing.
What is the markup in a staffing agency?
The difference between the bill rate charged to the client and the pay rate, which must cover employer costs and overhead as well as profit.
Who approves timesheets for temporary workers?
Usually the client’s site supervisor approves hours, and the agency checks and locks them before processing pay and invoices.
Managing placed workers across multiple client sites? StaffTiming keeps client billing and worker pay tied to the same approved tracked record.