Timesheets and temp payroll: what happens between Sunday and Friday

The chain, in order #

Five links, three parties, one deadline.

1. The worker records hours

   Usually after the fact, sometimes from memory.

2. Somebody at the client approves them

   A person whose actual job is something else.

3. The agency reconciles

   What was approved, against what was booked and what the rate card says.

4. Payroll runs

   And HMRC is told on or before payday in a Full Payment Submission.

5. The invoice comes off the same hours

   With a margin the client has agreed.

Each link can only start when the one before it finishes, and only the last two are inside your building. That is the whole problem in a sentence.

Why the approval is the weak link #

The approver is a site supervisor, a ward manager, a shift lead or an office manager. Approving agency hours is not in their objectives, it lands at their busiest hour of the week, and the consequence of ignoring it falls on somebody else.

Add a site where nobody is at a desk, a supervisor on leave with no named deputy, and an approval route that exists in one person's memory, and you have a queue that regenerates every week.

The queries make it worse. Half an hour of overtime nobody logged. A shift that was covered by somebody else. A bank holiday at a different rate. A worker who did Tuesday at one site and Thursday at another on two different rates. None of these is hard. All of them need a person to look at two records and decide which is right.

The rate card is where the money leaks #

Most temp desks do not lose money on the headline rate. They lose it in the corners: an overtime threshold applied to the wrong base, a rate uplift agreed by email and never written into the schedule, a bank holiday paid at one multiple and billed at another. The reason those survive is that pay and bill are reconciled by hand, at speed, on a deadline, by somebody who is also chasing four missing sheets.

Statutory floors sit underneath all of it. These are the rates from 1 April 2026.

Minimum wage is enforced by the Fair Work Agency, which replaced the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and also covers employment agency standards.

Two dates that have to be tracked, not remembered #

The Key Information Document. Under regulation 13A of the Conduct Regulations, an employment business must give a work-seeker a Key Information Document before agreeing terms, on no more than two sides of A4. If details change, a revised document is due within five business days.

Every payslip a worker receives is implicitly compared against that document, and the mismatch arrives as a phone call.

The twelve week qualifying period. Regulation 7 of the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 sets a qualifying period of 12 continuous calendar weeks in the same role with the same hirer, across one or more assignments, with breaks of no more than six weeks disregarded when working out continuity.

That is a counting problem with exceptions, on a per worker per role basis, that determines pay. Counting problems with exceptions are exactly the kind of thing a person does badly and a system does well.

Which parts run on rules #

What this is really worth measuring #

Count two things for a month. How many hours the desk spends chasing and reconciling, and how many pay and bill discrepancies you find after the run rather than during it.

The second number is usually the one that pays for any change, and it is the one nobody tracks. The free tools will help with the first, and the free audit covers the whole week, including the compliance chase that competes for the same Monday morning.