Staffing & recruiting agencies

Time tracking built for staffing and recruiting agencies

Dozens of contractors, many client sites, ~3% net margins — where a mis-keyed hour or the wrong bill rate wipes out the placement. Timix.AI captures every hour once at the placement level, routes it through approval, and turns pay-vs-bill spread into margin you can see per contractor and per client.

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One week, every placement filed

Northwind Logistics · 4 contractors on-site — T&M 146.0 h
Acme Manufacturing · night-shift crew — T&M 88.5 h
Internal · recruiting & bench time — OVH 22.0 h
Gross margin · Northwind placement 23%

Illustrative entries

01 The problem

On thin margins, every leaked hour is the profit

Staffing is an hours-in, hours-out business at ~3–5% net margin: pay a contractor a pay rate, bill the client a higher bill rate, and live on the spread. When the hours are wrong, there is no margin left to absorb it.

Hours re-keyed from timesheet to payroll to invoice

More than 5% of billable revenue leaks each year to delayed approvals, missed hours, and rate mismatches — enough to erase a full year's profit at a ~3% net margin. The root cause is re-keying: the same hours typed into the VMS, then payroll, then billing, each pass a fresh chance to bill the wrong number.

Approvals don't scale past a handful of contractors

Run dozens or hundreds of contractors across many client sites and the approval chain becomes the bottleneck. Late sign-off delays invoicing and the payroll you must fund weekly — and a timesheet that doesn't match the bill is the number-one cause of client billing disputes.

Margin per placement is invisible until it's too late

Pay-vs-bill spread varies by contractor, client, and assignment, and it hides in scattered rate cards. Without live margin and a cap on each assignment, a placement runs over its contracted hours — and you find out when the month closes, not while there's still margin to protect.

02 How Timix.AI fits

From placement to invoice: capture, approve, and protect margin

The hierarchy, dual rates, and budget caps were built for businesses running many billable people in parallel on thin margins — which is to say, for a staffing agency.

Every hour captured once — no re-keying

Model each client as a customer and each placement as a project or task, and every hour lands once at the SubTask level. Approved time flows straight into the Unbilled Time and Customer Billing reports and on to an invoice — no retyping between systems, so the number you bill is the number that was worked.

All time is logged at the SubTask level (auto-created when needed), then surfaces directly in the Unbilled Time and Customer Billing reports — entered once, not re-keyed.

Approvals that scale to hundreds of contractors

Contractors submit, approvers accept or reject with a reason, and a pending queue keeps the backlog visible. Managers own a book of clients and see only their assigned contractors, so sign-off stays fast — and a closed month locks the period once everyone's approved.

Submit / approve / reject with a reason, a pending queue, and a month-lock — Managers approve only the clients and projects assigned to them.

Pay rate vs bill rate — margin per placement, live

Give every contractor a cost (pay) rate and a bill rate; both cascade down the tree and override at any level, so a client-specific rate card or a shift premium sits exactly where it applies. Margin per client rolls up automatically instead of hiding in a spreadsheet.

Dual cost and bill rates cascade down and override at any level, with per-client margin roll-up on Professional and up.

A cap and an alert on every assignment

Put an hour-cap or fixed-amount budget on any placement — Project, Task, or SubTask. Soft limits warn as the contracted hours run down; hard limits stop entry at the cap; and threshold alerts fire off live hours, so an assignment can't quietly burn past its margin.

Hour-cap or fixed-amount budgets at Project, Task, or SubTask — soft limits warn, hard limits stop at the moment of entry, with threshold alerts off live hours.

3 billing types per placement — T&M, Fixed Price, Overhead

2 rates on every contractor — cost (pay) and bill — for live margin

Many report pages, including Unbilled Time and Customer Billing

On the reports tab

Reports you'll actually open

Built-in report pages ship with every workspace. These are the ones this team reaches for — each one exports to PDF or CSV, billing-ready.

Unbilled Time
Customer Billing
Resource Utilization
Budget vs Actual
Team Performance

By role

One ledger, read differently

Owner, Admin, Finance, Manager, Member, Viewer — six roles, scoped so each person sees exactly what they should.

Owner / Admin

Run the back office: stand up clients and placements, set each contractor's pay and bill rates, wire up hour caps and alert thresholds, and watch utilization and margin across every account from the dashboard.

Manager

Own a book of clients. Approve or reject submitted hours with a reason, keep the pending queue clear before payroll runs, and catch a placement running over its contracted hours before it eats the spread.

Member / Viewer

Contractors (Members) log against the placements they're assigned to via timer, week grid, or one sentence to Timix.AI. Viewers — an account manager or an auditor — get read-only sight of hours and margin, nothing more.

03 See it with your own placements

Track your first placement this week

No pre-seeded staffing demo — you start with your own workspace. Bulk-import clients and placements from CSV, set each contractor's pay and bill rates, invite the crew to log time, and read margin per client on real hours. The trial is full access: every report, every billing type, 90 days.

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Want to look around first? The pre-seeded IT-services demo is open to everyone and shows the same hierarchy, dual-rate, and margin mechanics on realistic data. Open the IT-services demo

04 FAQ

Staffing-agency time tracking, asked plainly

Does Timix.AI integrate with our VMS or payroll system?

There are no ready-made VMS, MSP, or payroll connectors today, and we won't pretend otherwise. Professional and Business plans include a key-authenticated Integration API covering customers, projects, tasks, and time, plus Zapier, Make, and Workato connectors — so your team can push approved hours into payroll or a VMS itself. Bulk CSV import covers getting existing clients and placements in.

Can we see margin per contractor and per client?

Yes. Give each contractor a cost (pay) rate and a bill rate; both cascade down the tree and can be overridden per client, project, or assignment. Margin per client rolls up automatically on Professional and up, so the pay-vs-bill spread stops living in a spreadsheet.

How do we stop an assignment running over its contracted hours?

Put an hour-cap budget on the placement at Project, Task, or SubTask level. Soft limits warn as the hours run down and hard limits stop entry at the cap, with threshold alerts firing off live hours — so a contractor can't quietly bill past the contracted amount.

Will contractors on-site actually log their time?

That's the design goal: a persistent timer that survives navigation, a week grid with Copy Last Week, and duration or start/end entry with overlap prevention. On any paid plan they can also tell Timix.AI "log 8 hours on the Northwind night shift" — a sentence instead of a form. It installs as an offline-capable web app (PWA) for phones on client sites.

Can one client have both T&M and fixed-price placements?

Yes. Time & Materials, Fixed Price, and Overhead are set per Project, Task, or SubTask and inherit down the tree, so a T&M contract crew and a fixed-price project for the same client each compute correctly — and Overhead keeps recruiting and bench time out of the billable numbers.

Nearby on the ledger

Related use cases

/use-cases/professional-services

Time tracking for professional services firms

/use-cases/time-and-materials-tracking

Time & Materials (T&M) tracking

/use-cases/client-profitability-tracking

Margin per client and placement

All use cases →

Keep reading

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Time entry, budgets, approvals, reports, Timix.AI — the full inventory.

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Ready when you are

Stop leaking margin between the timesheet and the invoice.

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