Run a contract book on margin, not on fee

The billing event on a permanent placement is a start date. The billing event on a contract placement is an approved timesheet, and it happens every week for as long as the assignment runs. That is a different rhythm, and a system that only models the fee invoice will always leave the contract book to a spreadsheet.

Surhires captures hours against the assignment, routes them to the named approver on the client side, and holds the unapproved ones in a queue that is visible to the desk rather than buried in a finance mailbox. Approved hours produce a billing line at the assignment's bill rate, with overtime rules applied where the assignment carries them. Missing timesheets are surfaced with the same urgency as a stalled submittal, because an unapproved week is unbilled revenue.

The billing line is the handoff point. Surhires raises the invoice detail and pushes it to your accounting system; it is not the ledger, and it does not run payroll.

The most profitable candidate on a contract desk is one you have already placed. They have been referenced, they have been through the client's onboarding, and they are billing today. Losing them at the end of an assignment because nobody called in week eleven of a twelve-week contract is the most common avoidable loss in contingent staffing.

Surhires counts down every live assignment and opens a redeployment task at a lead time you set per client or per discipline. The task carries the contractor's current rate, their stated availability, their compliance document expiry dates and the requisitions they already match, so the call is a specific conversation rather than a check-in.

Extensions are tracked as events against the assignment with their own end dates, so a book of forty contractors on rolling extensions does not quietly become a book of forty unknown end dates.

On a contract book you are financing the client. You pay the contractor weekly and you collect from the client on terms, which means every additional head on an account increases what you stand to lose if that account stops paying. Credit is usually treated as a finance concern that arrives after the placement, which is exactly the wrong order.

Surhires holds a credit limit and current exposure on the client record, computed from live assignments and unpaid invoices, and shows it on the requisition before a recruiter works the role. An account that is over its limit or slipping on payment carries a flag where the desk will see it. The flag does not block the work; it makes the decision to keep filling a deliberate one taken by somebody who can see the number.

A permanent desk can survive treating the candidate as the object and the client as an attribute of the job. A staffing desk cannot. The contractor is a person you will place four times and who talks to your competitors while they are on assignment. The client is an account with a rate card, a master service agreement, several hiring managers who do not agree with each other, and a purchase-order process that will hold an invoice for a missing reference number.

Both are first-class records in Surhires, with their own activity streams. On the client you see every requisition opened, every candidate submitted, fill rate, average time to fill, current exposure and the last time anybody spoke to each contact. On the contractor you see every assignment, every rate, every extension, every compliance document and every conversation.

The Client Health Agent watches the account side and raises the ones going quiet: open requisitions with no recent submittals, a hiring manager who has not been contacted in a month, a fill rate that has dropped since the last renewal.

A temp-to-perm placement is two commercial events joined by a conversion clause. The contract period bills weekly on a spread; the conversion bills once, usually on a scale that tapers with the hours already worked. If the system does not model the taper, somebody works it out in a spreadsheet and eventually gets it wrong in the client's favour.

Surhires records the conversion terms on the assignment when it starts: the conversion fee basis, the taper schedule and the point at which conversion becomes free. When the client raises the conversion, the fee that is due is derived from hours already billed rather than reconstructed from email. The placement then carries a guarantee window like any permanent placement, and stays visible until that window closes.

Surhires is recruitment software. It is not a payroll bureau, not an employer of record, not a back-office accounting system and not a workers compensation provider. It does not calculate withholding, file returns, or determine whether a given worker is properly classified in a given state. Those are functions you already buy or already run, and pretending otherwise on a marketing page would only cost you time in an evaluation.

What it does is hold the front office: the candidate relationship, the client relationship, the submittal, the assignment, the margin on it, the hours that make it billable and the handoff into whatever system prints the cheque.