Recruitment Agency Timesheet Software Compared

Q: What is recruitment agency timesheet software?

Recruitment agency timesheet software is the system an agency uses to collect, approve, and bill the hours its placed workers put in at client sites. Workers submit their time, a manager at the client signs it off, and that one approved entry then feeds two outputs: pay for the worker and an invoice for the client. That second output is what ordinary time tracking lacks. An agency tracks time for more than payroll. The hours are what it sells, and the spread between the pay rate and the bill rate on each placement is the agency’s margin.

Q: What does pay and bill mean?

Pay and bill is staffing-industry shorthand for handling both money flows of a placement from a single approved timesheet. The same hours are paid to the worker at their pay rate and invoiced to the client at its bill rate, and the agency keeps the difference as its margin. The concept is simple, yet most of the difficulty in agency software sits here, because rates change with the placement, the shift type, the overtime threshold, and sometimes the terms of a client contract. A mistake on either side means a worker paid too little or a client charged too little. A tool that outputs a payroll file but never produces the invoice is not a pay and bill system.

Q: Why do recruitment agency and staffing agency return different software?

Each phrase belongs to a different market, and the software sold under it is built for that market. Recruitment agency is the everyday term in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and India, so search results for it are dominated by vendors built around those markets, with off-payroll working rules, agency worker regulations, and local payroll integrations. Staffing agency is the American term, and its results are dominated by vendors built around multi-state tax registration, ACA tracking, and US payroll. The category description sounds identical either way, but the products are not interchangeable: a buyer who uses the phrase from the wrong side of the Atlantic ends up with a shortlist they cannot actually use.

Q: How much does agency timesheet software cost?

Published prices run from Zoho Workerly’s free tier, which covers five temps, up to $165 per user per month for Bullhorn’s Core plan, and Bullhorn quotes its timesheet and billing module separately on top. Those public figures are the exception: most established platforms in this category keep prices private and quote each agency individually, which makes the market unusually opaque. Vendors also differ in what they charge for rather than in tiers: some bill per agency seat, some per placed worker per month, and some set a quote by candidate volume. Because the units differ, headline prices mislead, and the fair comparison is total cost at your real worker count and seat count.

Q: Can a staffing agency use a general time tracking app instead?

Yes, for capturing hours, and it will cost far less. The trouble starts on the billing side. A general workforce app has nowhere to store a pay rate and a different bill rate for each placement, cannot turn one approved timesheet into a worker payment and a client invoice at once, and keeps no record of which client each worker was assigned to. Agencies do work around this by exporting hours and building invoices in accounting software, and at low volume the workaround holds. Once there are enough placements that matching approved hours against invoices becomes a job in itself, it breaks down, and that point tends to arrive sooner than most agency owners expect.

Q: Do agency workers count as employees of the agency?

It depends on how the arrangement is set up and which jurisdiction it falls under, and that answer drives most of the compliance load. In many US staffing arrangements the agency is the employer of record for the temp, so it runs payroll, withholds taxes, handles workers compensation, and completes the I-9. In other arrangements the worker is an independent contractor, which puts taxes on a completely different footing and creates misclassification exposure if the real working relationship does not support contractor status. Some arrangements use co-employment, where the client shares the employer obligations. The test for classifying a worker is the same one used in any industry, and mistakes are costly.

Q: What is the difference between timesheet software and time and attendance software?

The difference is what the record is for. In the agency sense, timesheet software logs blocks of hours against a placement or project so someone can be billed for them. Time and attendance software captures exactly when a particular employee began and ended work, so that pay comes out right and compliance with wage and hour rules can be proven. The second kind comes with legal recordkeeping duties that the Fair Labor Standards Act imposes, and the first generally does not. Agencies that employ their own temps need both, which is one reason agency platforms cost more than either kind of tool by itself.

Q: What should an agency look for in timesheet software?

Look for four capabilities, roughly in this order of importance. First, an approval step that managers at your client will actually use, because timesheets that nobody at the client site approves create more chasing than they remove. Second, pay and bill rates stored on each placement instead of on the worker, because one person can carry different rates at different clients. Third, approved hours that flow straight into both payroll and invoicing with no manual re-entry. Fourth, a mobile experience built for workers, who log hours on a phone at the job site rather than at a desk. Anything past these four is a preference, not a requirement.

Q: Does agency timesheet software handle onboarding for placed workers?

Some of the bigger platforms do, because an agency brings new temps on board constantly and in large numbers, and onboarding support is a real point of difference between agency systems. Where they generally fall short is the agency’s own internal staff: the recruiters, account managers, and back-office employees it hires directly. Those people form a separate group with their own paperwork, and they normally sit outside the placement system altogether.

Recruitment and staffing agency timesheet software compared on pay and bill, client invoicing, and price, plus why UK and US searches differ.

Nick Anisimov

FirstHR Founder

Time Tracking•

July 24, 2026

•

15 min

Recruitment Agency Timesheet Software

Why the same search returns British and American tools, what pay and bill actually means, and which of nine products fit an agency placing workers rather than hiring them

Search for recruitment agency timesheet software and you get British products. Search for staffing agency timesheet software, which sounds like the same request, and you get American ones. Search for agency timesheet software without either qualifier and you get tools built for marketing studios billing client hours. I build HR software for small businesses, and I would flag this trap first.

The split is not a quirk of the search engine. It reflects a real divide in the market, and a US agency that shortlists from the British results will spend a demo cycle on platforms built around off-payroll working rules it will never encounter.

Underneath the terminology there is one genuine category: software that collects hours from placed workers, gets those hours approved by someone at the client site, and then pays the worker and bills the client from the same record. This comparison covers what that requires, which of nine products do it, and where the cheaper general-purpose tools stop.

TL;DR

Pay and bill defines this category: one approved timesheet pays the worker and invoices the client. Recruitment agency searches return UK-built vendors; staffing agency searches return US ones. Most platforms quote privately and price by different units. Zoho Workerly publishes a free tier and $59 a month; Deputy and ClockShark track hours cheaply but cannot run pay and bill.

Why this search returns two different categories

Two distinct kinds of business track hours and both call the result a timesheet, which is why the results blur.

Question	Agency placing workers	Employer hiring staff
Who the worker is	A temp or contractor placed at a client site	An employee on your own payroll
Why hours are tracked	To pay the worker and invoice the client	To pay the worker and meet wage and hour rules
Who approves the hours	A manager at the client company	A manager inside your own company
What the hours produce	A pay run and a client invoice with a margin	A pay run only
What the software is	Agency back office, pay and bill	Time and attendance, or HR with time tracking
Typical pricing unit	Per placed worker or per agency seat	Per employee or a flat platform fee

Both columns describe an employer tracking hours, which is why the search results blur together. The right-hand column never needs an invoice, which is why the products in it cost a fraction of the products in the left-hand column.

The distinction that matters is in the fourth row. An employer tracking its own staff needs the hours to reach payroll correctly and to satisfy wage and hour recordkeeping. An agency needs the same thing plus an invoice, and the invoice has to carry a different rate than the payment, against the same hours, for the same worker, at a specific client.

This is why the price gap between the two categories is so large

A general workforce tool such as Deputy starts at $5 per user per month. Bullhorn's published small-agency plans cost $99 and $165 per user per month before you add its timesheet and billing module, and most agency back-office platforms will not quote without a call. The gap is not vendor greed; it is the invoicing half of the job, plus the rate tables, client contract terms, and approval routing that make invoicing possible. If you do not need to invoice a client from your timesheets, you are looking at the wrong category and paying for it.

What pay and bill actually means

Pay and bill means one approved timesheet does two jobs: it pays the worker at the pay rate and invoices the client at the bill rate, and the difference between the two is the agency's margin. Every vendor in this space uses the phrase and few explain it, so here is the mechanic step by step.

Step	What happens	Where it breaks
Placement setup	Worker assigned to a client with a pay rate and a bill rate	Rates stored on the worker rather than the placement
Hours captured	Worker submits hours, usually from a phone at the site	Paper or text-message submission that nobody can audit
Client approval	A manager at the client company approves the hours	The client will not log in, so someone chases by email
Pay run	Approved hours produce a payment at the pay rate	Overtime thresholds applied inconsistently across clients
Invoice	The same hours produce an invoice at the bill rate	Invoice built by hand in accounting software from an export
Margin visible	The difference is the agency margin on that placement	Margin only knowable at month end, not per placement

The third row is where agencies actually lose time. A client-side approval step that the client finds annoying will be skipped, and skipped approvals mean either delayed invoicing or invoicing hours nobody signed off on. Whichever product you pick, the approval experience for the client manager matters more than any feature aimed at your own team.

The fourth row is where the legal exposure sits. When the agency employs a nonexempt (overtime-eligible) temp, federal rules require it to total every hour that temp works for it in the workweek, even across unrelated assignments (29 CFR 778.103). A week split between two clients can therefore owe overtime that neither client's timesheet shows on its own.

Rates belong to the placement, not to the worker

Storing rates on the worker is the configuration mistake that causes the most rework. The same worker may be placed at two clients at two different bill rates, or at the same client on two different shift patterns. A system that stores a single rate against the worker record will produce quietly wrong invoices the moment that happens, and the error is usually found by a client who reviews their bill carefully rather than by the agency. Confirm during a demo that rates attach to the placement and that overtime billing terms can differ per client contract.

Recruitment agency, staffing agency, and why the words matter

The two phrases describe the same business and belong to different markets. This is not pedantry, because the compliance features built into each product follow the market it was built for. In the table's last column, IR35 means the UK's off-payroll working rules, AWR its Agency Workers Regulations, and HMRC its tax authority.

Term	Primary market	Vendors you will find	Compliance context
Recruitment agency	UK, Ireland, Australia, India	Timesheet Portal and ETZ	IR35 status, AWR parity, HMRC reporting
Staffing agency	United States and Canada	Avionte, TempWorks, WurkNow, Bullhorn	Multi-state tax, ACA tracking, an I-9 for each worker hired
Labour hire	Australia and New Zealand	Regional platforms and local vendors	State labour hire licensing schemes
Agency, unqualified	Mixed and ambiguous	Creative and marketing time trackers	Billable client hours, not placed workers

The word you search with determines the vendors you see. A US agency searching the British phrasing will be shown platforms built around UK payroll and off-payroll working rules, and a UK agency searching the American phrasing will be shown platforms built around state-level tax registration.

Platforms built for the British market handle off-payroll working status determinations, which mid-size and large UK clients make for contractors working through their own limited company. They also handle agency worker parity rules, which give a temp the same pay as permanent staff after 12 weeks in the job. Neither exists in US law.

Those British platforms may not handle registration for withholding in multiple states, which is a routine requirement the moment an agency places a worker across a state line. The reverse applies to a UK agency evaluating American platforms.

Check which payroll systems a vendor integrates with

The fastest way to identify which market a product was built for, without reading marketing copy, is to look at its integration list. A platform that integrates with British accounting and payroll systems was built for that market regardless of how the homepage is worded, and one that integrates with US payroll providers was built for this one. Integration lists are harder to reword for an international audience than a product page is.

Agency time tracking when nobody is placed

Not every agency places people. A marketing, design, or consulting agency tracks hours against client projects to bill retainers and to see which accounts earn their keep, and that is a different product category with different economics. There is no placement carrying a pay rate and a separate bill rate, because the hours belong to salaried staff.

If that describes your firm, the products on this page are the wrong shortlist and cost several times what you need. Look at billing and time tracking software instead, where the job is turning your own employees' project hours into a client invoice rather than reconciling two rates for a worker on a client site.

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9 agency timesheet products compared

Seven of the nine products below are built for agencies, and several of those are full staffing platforms that include an applicant tracking system (ATS). The other two are general workforce tools, here because agencies genuinely evaluate them on price and deserve a clear answer about where they stop.

Product	Best For	Entry Price	Trial
Bullhorn Time & Expense	Agencies already on Bullhorn ATS	Quote	Demo
Avionte	Established US staffing firms	Quote	Demo
TempWorks	US agencies wanting one system	Quote	Demo
WurkNow	Light industrial and warehouse	Quote	Demo
Zoho Workerly	Small temp desks on a budget	$59/mo	Free tier
Timesheet Portal	Pay and bill without a full ATS	Modular	Demo
ETZ	Agencies wanting volume-based pricing	Quote	Demo
Deputy	Shift scheduling, not agency billing	$5/user	Free trial
ClockShark	Field crews with GPS requirements	$40 + $9/user	14-day trial

Pricing verified as of October 2026 from vendor pricing pages and vendor documentation. Most agency back-office platforms do not publish list pricing and quote per agency. Pay and Bill means the platform pays the worker and bills the client from the same approved hours, which is the defining capability of this category. Placement Records means the timesheet ties to a placement and a client account rather than to an internal department. The last two rows are general workforce tools included because agencies evaluate them on price; both track hours, ClockShark can also invoice a job, and neither runs pay and bill from a placement.

Bullhorn Time and Expense

The time and expense module attached to Bullhorn's ATS and CRM, which the company says more than 10,000 companies use. Time capture, timesheet management, expense handling, and approval routing all sit in the same record as the placement, which is the argument for it: no synchronization between the system that made the placement and the system that bills for it.

Bullhorn quotes the timesheet and billing side rather than publishing a price. Timesheet management, invoicing, and pay and bill automation are sold as its Middle Office product or inside the Bullhorn One platform.

Bullhorn's applicant tracking plans for small agencies do publish rates: $99 per user per month for Starter and $165 for Core, both with free implementation. Whichever way an agency buys the timesheet side, the purchase is an ecosystem commitment rather than a single product.

Pros

Placement, timesheet, and invoice live in one record with no sync step

Built specifically for the complexities of staffing rather than adapted to them

Integrates with vendor management systems used by larger clients

Scales from small agency to enterprise without replatforming

Cons

Value depends on already running Bullhorn ATS and CRM

No published price for the timesheet and billing module

Timesheets sit outside the published Starter and Core plans

Overbuilt and overpriced for an agency with a handful of placements

Avionte

A full staffing platform covering applicant tracking, payroll, billing, and time and attendance, built for the North American market and, by the company's count, used by more than 1,000 staffing agencies. The appeal is completeness: an agency running Avionte is not assembling a stack.

Pros

Front office and back office in one platform including payroll and billing

Built for North American tax and compliance requirements

Deep experience in high-volume industrial and clerical staffing

Vendor management system integrations for enterprise clients

Cons

Quote-only pricing with no published rates at any tier

Implementation runs through its own team with no published timeline

More platform than a small or new agency needs

Migration off it later is correspondingly difficult

TempWorks

A long-established US staffing platform spanning applicant tracking, CRM, time management, billing, and payroll. Like Avionte, it is aimed at agencies that want one vendor for the whole operation rather than a timesheet tool bolted to an ATS.

Pros

Complete front and back office coverage under one vendor

Long track record in US staffing across agency sizes

Time management ties directly to billing and payroll

Serves both small agencies and larger multi-branch operations

Cons

Quote-only pricing requiring a sales conversation

Two product lines, Enterprise and the newer browser-based Beyond, so confirm which one a quote covers

Full platform commitment rather than a modular purchase

Setup effort is significant relative to lightweight tools

WurkNow

A newer US platform aimed at light industrial and warehouse staffing, where the operational pattern is high volume, short assignments, and shift-based work. Time tracking, payroll, and applicant tracking are bundled, with the workforce-facing experience built around mobile.

Pros

Built for the high-volume light industrial staffing pattern

Modern mobile experience for workers submitting hours on site

Time tracking, payroll, and sourcing in one platform

Newer architecture than the long-established incumbents

Cons

Quote-only pricing with no published rates

Narrower industry focus than the general staffing platforms

Shorter track record than older staffing platforms

Less relevant for professional or clerical placements

Zoho Workerly

Zoho Workerly publishes its whole price list. A Forever Free plan covers five temps and two active jobs, with scheduling and timesheets included. The Premium plan costs $59 per month on monthly billing and covers the first 25 temps, which is the minimum. Beyond those, it charges $1.50 per extra temp up to 500 and $1 above that.

Workerly puts scheduling, electronic timesheets, client approval, and built-in invoicing in one interface, and the paid plan connects to Zoho Books. For a small temp desk moving off spreadsheets, this is the shortest path from scheduled shift to approved hours to invoice. A 14-day Premium trial adds invoicing to the free plan, so evaluation is genuinely risk-free.

Pros

Published pricing including a free tier for very small desks

Scheduling, timesheets, and invoicing in one interface

Per-temp pricing falls as the agency places more workers

Integrates with Zoho accounting for the invoicing side

Cons

Paid plan starts at a 25-temp minimum regardless of actual count

Payroll compatibility needs confirming for your specific provider

Lighter on US-specific compliance than the dedicated US platforms

Best value assumes willingness to use the wider Zoho ecosystem

Timesheet Portal

A pay and bill specialist rather than a full agency platform, built for the British market. It is used by recruitment and project-based agencies that want tight control over the timesheet-to-invoice path without buying an applicant tracking system they do not need. Pricing is modular, charged for the components an agency actually uses.

Pros

Focused on pay and bill rather than bundling an ATS

Modular pricing means paying only for components used

Strong expense handling alongside timesheets

Built for recruitment and project-based businesses

Cons

Built around UK payroll and compliance rather than US

Pricing is modular and therefore hard to compare directly

Not an applicant tracking system: placements originate elsewhere

Less relevant for a US agency with multi-state obligations

ETZ

Another British specialist, sold in the UK and Australia as a single package covering timesheets, invoicing, expenses, reporting, and candidate onboarding. Client managers approve timesheets from a secure emailed link, without a username or password, which goes straight at the approval problem described above.

ETZ prices that package on a bespoke quote that varies with candidate volume, and an agency can add as many users as it wants. For an agency whose worker count fluctuates seasonally, a price that tracks placement volume rather than office headcount can align cost with revenue more closely than a seat license does.

Pros

Price follows candidate volume rather than office seats

Clients approve timesheets from an emailed link with no login

Covers the timesheet-to-invoice path including onboarding

As many internal users as the agency wants

Cons

Rates are not published and require contact

Built for UK and Australian compliance rather than US

Price rises with candidate volume, so model it at peak season

Narrower scope than the full staffing platforms

Deputy

A general workforce management tool for scheduling and time tracking. With annual billing it costs $5 per user per month on Lite, $6.50 on Core, and $9 on Pro, and month-to-month plans carry a $30 minimum monthly spend.

For an agency, the honest verdict is that Deputy does one half of the job very well and the other half not at all. It will schedule shifts, capture clock-ins, and export to payroll. It will not hold a bill rate, produce a client invoice, or record which client account a shift belonged to in a billable sense.

Pros

An order of magnitude cheaper than agency platforms

Excellent scheduling and shift management for hourly work

Clean mobile experience for workers clocking in

Published pricing with a free trial and no sales call

Cons

No client invoicing: the billing half must live elsewhere

No pay rate and bill rate pair against a placement

Per-user pricing means cost climbs with every placed worker

A $30 monthly minimum applies on month-to-month plans

ClockShark

Field-focused time tracking built for construction and trades, at $40 per month plus $9 per user on Standard and $60 plus $11 per user on Pro. Both plans include quotes and invoices for jobs, but nothing in ClockShark pairs a pay rate with a bill rate on a placement.

The relevance to agencies is narrow but real: an agency placing crews at physical job sites where location verification matters gets GPS-stamped time capture that general office tools do not offer.

Pros

GPS-verified clock-ins for workers at remote job sites

Job costing gives visibility into cost per assignment

Quotes and invoices for jobs on both plans

Published pricing with a 14-day trial

Cons

Invoices jobs, not placements at agency bill rates

Base fee on top of per-user pricing raises the effective cost

Built for direct employers in the trades, not for placement agencies

Irrelevant for clerical, professional, or remote placements

Why pricing in this category is hard to compare

Pricing in this category is hard to compare for two reasons: vendors charge by different units, and implementation costs usually stay hidden until a vendor quotes you. Most comparison content presents a price column and moves on, but here that column is close to meaningless.

Pricing unit	What it means	Who it favors
Per agency seat	You pay for recruiters and back-office staff	Agencies with many placements and few internal staff
Per placed worker	You pay for each temp or contractor on assignment	Agencies with few placements and a larger internal team
Per timesheet processed	You pay by transaction volume	Agencies with seasonal or fluctuating placement volume
Modular	You pay per component used	Agencies needing only part of the platform
Quote only	No public rate at any tier	Nobody comparing options efficiently

The first reason comparison fails is that these units are not convertible without knowing your specific ratio of internal staff to placed workers. An agency with four recruiters and two hundred placements and an agency with twenty recruiters and forty placements will rank these vendors in opposite orders, and neither ranking is wrong.

The second is implementation. Bullhorn includes it free on its published small-agency plans, but the quote-only platforms publish no price for setup, so that cost surfaces only in a private quote. Any comparison that omits implementation understates the first-year cost of exactly the products that are hardest to leave.

Ask for a first-year total, not a monthly rate

The useful question in a sales conversation is what the first twelve months cost in total at your actual seat count and placement volume, including implementation, data migration, training, and any per-transaction fees. Vendors quote monthly per-seat rates because that number is small. The first-year total is the number you are actually deciding on, and asking for it directly tends to surface the fees that would otherwise appear later.

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How to choose agency timesheet software

Work through these five questions in order. The first decides whether you need an agency platform at all, and the other four narrow the shortlist from there.

Do you need to invoice clients from these hours?

Ask this first because it splits the market cleanly. If approved hours have to become a client invoice at a bill rate different from the pay rate, you need an agency platform and the cheap general tools are off the table regardless of how attractive the price looks. If you invoice clients on a fixed monthly fee or a placement fee rather than on hours, you may genuinely only need time tracking, and paying agency platform prices for it is waste.

Which market was the product built for?

Check the integration list rather than the marketing copy. A platform integrating with British payroll and accounting systems was built around off-payroll working rules and agency worker regulations, which do not apply in the United States, so those features do nothing for you. A US agency needs multi-state tax registration handling, and a platform that has never needed to support it will not have built it. This eliminates roughly half the shortlist in one step.

Will the client manager actually approve timesheets in the system?

This determines whether the implementation succeeds, and it is almost never in a feature comparison. The approver is an employee of your client, not yours, and they have no obligation to learn your software. Look at what approval requires from them: an emailed link that approves in one click succeeds where a portal login with a password reset fails. Run this specific flow during a demo and imagine your least cooperative client contact doing it.

Do rates attach to the placement or to the worker?

Ask the vendor to show one worker on two placements at different bill rates, or on two shift patterns at the same client, and check that each invoice picks up the right rate. A system holding one rate per worker cannot pass that check, and in live use the error surfaces when a client audits their bill rather than when you send it. The pay and bill rates should sit on the placement, and overtime billing terms should be able to vary per client contract.

What does the first year actually cost at your volume?

Because vendors price by different units, the only comparable figure is total first-year cost at your real numbers: your seat count, your placement count, your timesheet volume, plus implementation, migration, and training. Build that figure for each shortlisted vendor before comparing anything else. Agencies that compare monthly per-seat rates routinely pick the platform that is cheapest per seat and most expensive in year one.

Before you choose

FirstHR covers the other half of an agency's people work. Pay and bill, client invoices, bill rates held against placements, and timesheets for placed workers come from the products above, so an agency shopping for the timesheet-to-invoice path should buy one of them.

That other half concerns a second population inside every agency. These platforms are not built for it, and it is easy to overlook precisely because the agency spends its attention on placements.

Population	Whose employee they are	Which system holds their record
Placed temps and contractors	The agency, in most US arrangements	The agency platform, by placement
Recruiters and account managers	The agency, directly	Generally nothing purpose-built
Back-office and payroll staff	The agency, directly	Generally nothing purpose-built
Branch managers and leadership	The agency, directly	Generally nothing purpose-built

Rows two through four are the agency's own staff. They are hired, onboarded, issued handbooks and policy acknowledgments, given equipment, reviewed, and eventually offboarded, and none of that lives in a platform designed around client placements. In agencies without a dedicated HR person this work typically sits in a folder and an inbox.

FirstHR covers that work with onboarding workflows, e-signature, document management with expiry dates, training modules with completion tracking, and employee records, at a flat $98 a month for up to 10 people or $198 for 11 to 50. We sit alongside an agency platform rather than replacing any part of it.

Key Takeaways

Pay and bill is the whole category. One approved timesheet has to produce both a worker payment at the pay rate and a client invoice at the bill rate, and software that only reaches payroll is not an agency system regardless of what its marketing says.

The phrasing of your search determines the vendors you see. Recruitment agency is British and Australasian and returns platforms built around off-payroll working rules; staffing agency is American and returns platforms built around multi-state tax registration. They are not interchangeable.

Rates belong to the placement rather than the worker. The same person may carry different bill rates at different clients, and a system storing one rate per worker produces invoices that are quietly wrong until a client audits them.

Client-side approval decides whether the rollout succeeds. The approver works for your client and owes your software nothing, so an emailed one-click approval succeeds where a portal login fails, and no feature list captures this.

Published prices are not comparable across vendors. Some charge per seat, some per placed worker, some by candidate volume, and most quote privately, so the only meaningful figure is total first-year cost at your actual volume.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is recruitment agency timesheet software?

Software that collects hours from workers placed at client sites, routes them for client approval, and then both pays the worker and invoices the client from the same approved record. The invoicing half is what separates it from ordinary time tracking, since the hours are the product the agency sells.

What does pay and bill mean?

Running both sides of a placement from one timesheet: the worker is paid their rate and the client is invoiced the bill rate, with the agency keeping the margin. The complexity comes from rates varying by placement, shift type, overtime threshold, and client contract terms.

Why do recruitment agency and staffing agency return different software?

Because the terms belong to different markets. Recruitment agency is standard in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, and those results feature vendors built for those markets. Staffing agency is American phrasing and returns vendors built around US payroll and multi-state tax. The products are not interchangeable.

How much does agency timesheet software cost?

Most established platforms quote privately rather than publishing rates. Where pricing is public, the unit varies, from per agency seat to per placed worker. Published examples run from a free tier for five temps to $165 per user monthly for an agency ATS plan, before any timesheet module is added.

Can a staffing agency use a general time tracking app instead?

For collecting hours, yes, and far more cheaply. It will not hold separate pay and bill rates against a placement, run the payment and the invoice from one approved timesheet, or record the client assignment in a billable sense. Agencies do export hours and invoice in accounting software, which works until reconciliation becomes its own job.

Do agency workers count as employees of the agency?

Often yes in US staffing, where the agency is frequently the employer of record and handles payroll, withholding, workers compensation, and the I-9. Other arrangements treat the worker as an independent contractor, which changes the tax treatment and carries misclassification risk.

What is the difference between timesheet software and time and attendance software?

Timesheet software records blocks of time against a placement for billing purposes. Time and attendance software records when an employee started and stopped for pay and compliance purposes, with recordkeeping obligations under the Fair Labor Standards Act attached. An agency employing its own temps needs both.

What should an agency look for in timesheet software?

Client approval workflow the client will actually use, pay and bill rates held at the placement rather than the worker, direct output to both payroll and invoicing without re-keying, and a worker-facing mobile experience. Everything beyond those four is preference rather than requirement.

Does agency timesheet software handle onboarding for placed workers?

Some larger platforms do, since agencies onboard continuously and at volume. What they generally do not cover is the internal staff an agency employs directly, who are a separate population with separate paperwork and typically sit outside the placement system entirely.

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Payroll

Recruitment Agency Timesheet Software Compared

Recruitment Agency Timesheet Software

Why this search returns two different categories

What pay and bill actually means

Recruitment agency, staffing agency, and why the words matter

Agency time tracking when nobody is placed

9 agency timesheet products compared

Bullhorn Time and Expense

Avionte

TempWorks

WurkNow

Zoho Workerly

Timesheet Portal

ETZ

Deputy

ClockShark

Why pricing in this category is hard to compare

How to choose agency timesheet software

Before you choose

Frequently Asked Questions

What is recruitment agency timesheet software?

What does pay and bill mean?

Why do recruitment agency and staffing agency return different software?

How much does agency timesheet software cost?

Can a staffing agency use a general time tracking app instead?

Do agency workers count as employees of the agency?

What is the difference between timesheet software and time and attendance software?

What should an agency look for in timesheet software?

Does agency timesheet software handle onboarding for placed workers?

Make HR the easy part of running your business

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