Checking staffing agency invoices against your own clock data

Checking staffing agency invoices means setting every line on your agency’s invoice against your own clock data: the hours, the allowances, the rate and the role. In practice that invoice check often looks different. Whoever reviews the invoices usually looks at whether the total is close to last week’s, which tells you very little. An agency invoice is a pile of lines, one per temp worker per day. With a few agencies and a full floor nobody keeps up with those lines by hand.

Why check agency invoices against your clock data?

Your clock knows what was worked. The invoice shows what the agency thinks was worked, and the agency gets its hours from a timesheet, an export or a portal. Plenty goes wrong on the way without anyone meaning to. A break is not deducted, a shift lands on the wrong day, or a temp worker is invoiced in a different role from the one they actually do on your floor.

A quarter of an hour here and an allowance there disappear in a long invoice. It works the other way too. Sometimes an agency charges too little, for example an allowance it does pay the worker. You want to know that as well, before it turns up on your accounts payable desk months later as a correction invoice.

Which lines on an agency invoice do you compare?

The hours and the allowances come from your clock data. The rate and the equal pay come from your agreements with the agency and from your own pay scheme.

Hours

Per temp worker per day: how many hours are on the invoice and how many does your clock give, after breaks and rounded the way you agreed. The sum is easy. The harder part is that the agency invoices on its own staff number while your clock knows a badge number. That lookup table has to be set up properly once.

Allowances and unsocial hours

An allowance for night shifts, weekends, public holidays or overtime depends on when the work was done, and that time is in your clock data. If someone works a night shift, those hours should carry an allowance on the invoice, at the percentage in your scheme. You check that line by line, not week by week.

Rate

The hourly rate or the multiplier per role is in the framework agreement with the agency. Two things must hold: the role on the invoice is the role the person does for you, and the rate belongs to that role. Around a rate change, check whether the old price is still showing up.

Equal pay (inlenersbeloning)

Under article 8 of the Waadi, a temp worker is entitled to at least the same pay and allowances as your own employees in the same or an equivalent role. That also covers working time such as overtime, night shifts and working on public holidays. A collective agreement may depart from this, so check which one your agency follows. If someone is in the wrong pay grade, the rate on your invoice is wrong and so is the worker’s pay.

How do you start checking agency invoices?

With a one-off check over the invoices of the past twelve months. A single month only shows how that month went. A year also shows you the run-up to the holidays, the summer with lots of new people and the rate change at the start of the year.

You need the invoices, as PDFs or as an export from the agency, and the export from your time and attendance system over the same period. Add the framework agreement, the rate list and your pay scheme. Every agency lays out its invoice differently. The system reads each PDF or export and pulls out the lines, and that is where AI does the work. Then everything is compared line by line. What matches drops off. What does not goes on a list with the invoice, the person, the day and the difference for each line.

You take that list to the agency. Some differences turn out to have a reason: someone worked at another site that day, or an arrangement never made it into the framework agreement. Put that arrangement on paper, or it will be on the list again next year.

After that, every new invoice goes through the same check

Once the check over the past works, you put it in front of payment. Lines that match go through. A line with a difference waits until someone looks at it, with the clock data next to it.

The system rejects nothing and pays nothing on its own. Your accounts payable team or your operations manager decides, as they do now, except the lines that need attention are at the top instead of on page six.

We build that check into what you already have: your time and attendance system, your accounting or ERP system and the mailbox where the invoices arrive. Why we prefer that to putting a package next to it is in bespoke or off the shelf. It is one process, and the next one comes only once this one works and has been measured. The other side of the same question, work you never invoiced yourself, is in unbilled work.

What does the Wtta change for you as a hirer?

From 1 January 2028 you may only hire workers from agencies with an admission or exemption from the Dutch Labour Market Authority (NAU), unless a legal exception applies. If you still work with an agency without admission, the Netherlands Labour Authority can fine you and you have to end the arrangement.

The act itself, the Wet toelating terbeschikkingstelling van arbeidskrachten (Wtta), takes effect on 1 January 2027. That year is a transition year. Agencies that want to use the transition scheme register between 1 November and 31 December 2026. They apply for admission itself between 1 May and 30 June 2027. From 1 July 2027 you can see in the NAU’s public register whether an agency is admitted, has an exemption or falls under the transition scheme. The Labour Authority enforces from 1 January 2028.

For your paperwork that means more than a tick box. Before the work starts, you record which agency someone works for you through, also when workers are lent on. You supply the terms of employment to the agency, and that is the basis of equal pay. The NAU advises checking regularly whether your agency still has its admission. You can run that check with every invoice, so it does not depend on someone remembering.

Does the works council have to agree?

It may. A scheme for processing the personal data of people who work in your company, and facilities that can monitor attendance or performance, need the consent of the works council (article 27 of the Dutch Works Councils Act, first paragraph under k and l). A check that uses clock data per person can fall under that. Temp workers count for the act once they have worked for you for at least 15 months. So put it to the works council first. We supply the documents for that, as our way of working says.

What do you get ready for the first check?

• The invoices of the past twelve months, per agency, as PDFs or as an export.
• The export from your time and attendance system over the same period.
• The framework agreement and the rate list of each agency.
• Your own pay scheme and the collective agreement the agency follows.
• The lookup table from the agency’s staff number to your badge number.
• The works council’s consent, if the check falls under it.

How we choose which process in a warehouse goes first is in AI in the warehouse.