The layers of staffing software, and which ones you still have to buy elsewhere

This layer is the recruitment software and the applicant tracking system, usually sold together. It holds candidates, clients, contacts, requisitions, submittals, interviews, offers and placements, plus the outbound communication that keeps all of it moving. It is the layer recruiters live in for eight hours a day and the layer that determines whether your database is an asset or a liability.

For an agency the front office has to do things a corporate applicant tracking system does not: treat the client as a record rather than a tag, treat the submittal as a first-class object rather than a status change, hold the commercial terms of a placement, and keep the candidate record earning after the requisition closes. Surhires sits entirely in this layer, and the depth we have is here rather than spread thinly across six.

The front office is also where AI has landed hardest, in matching, parsing, screening, note-taking and outbound personalisation. When comparing products, check which of those are on the plan you would actually buy and which are metered or gated above it.

Pay and bill is the machinery that turns approved time into money in two directions: what the contractor is paid and what the client is charged, with the difference reconciled as margin. It handles rate cards with overtime, holiday and shift uplifts, on-costs, statutory deductions, umbrella and limited-company arrangements in the United Kingdom, contractor classification in the United States, self-billing, credit notes and consolidated invoicing for clients who want one invoice a month covering forty workers.

It is genuinely hard software and it is regulated differently in every market. Surhires does not do it. If you run a temp or contract book with weekly payment cycles, you need a pay and bill system alongside the front office, and the integration between them is a real project rather than a checkbox.

What Surhires does hold is the commercial terms on the placement record: pay rate, charge rate, fee basis, invoice trigger, guarantee window and extension history. That is enough to keep the pipeline honest and to raise a first placement invoice, and it is the point at which we hand off.

Timesheets look simple and are not. Weekly or fortnightly cycles, client approval chains with deputies for holidays, split cost centres, break rules that differ by jurisdiction, expenses with receipts, shift confirmation for blue-collar desks, mobile capture for people who are not at a desk, and a dispute process for the week where the client says thirty-two hours and the contractor says thirty-eight.

Surhires does not capture timesheets. There is no partial version of this in the product and we are not going to describe a roadmap item as though it were a shipping capability. Firms running volume temp desks should treat time capture as a specialist purchase, usually bundled with pay and bill from the same vendor because the two are joined at the hip.

A VMS is software the client or their managed service provider runs to control contingent labour: requisitions are distributed to a supplier panel, submissions are keyed in through the portal, rates are governed centrally and invoicing is consolidated. If you supply into large enterprises, you already know the daily cost, which is recruiters re-keying submittals from your own system into someone else's portal.

Some agency platforms offer VMS connectors for specific programmes. Surhires does not have VMS integration today, and re-keying remains a manual step for firms working through those programmes. That is a real limitation and a legitimate reason to choose a different front office if a large share of your revenue arrives through a specific VMS.

The back office is the ledger: sales and purchase invoices, credit control, aged debt, VAT or sales tax, multi-entity consolidation for groups, commission calculation for recruiters and management accounts. Firms run this in a general accounting platform, in a staffing-specific back office, or in an enterprise resource planning system, and the choice is usually made by the finance director rather than by the recruitment team.

Surhires raises the first placement invoice from the placement record and hands off to accounting through QuickBooks or Xero. It is not a ledger, it does not do credit control or aged debt, and it does not calculate payroll. Commission calculation from placement data is the kind of thing agencies frequently want and which we currently support only as far as the underlying placement records go.

Background checks, right-to-work and working-rights verification, professional registration checks, drug screening and skills assessment are specialist services with their own providers. The front office's job is to hold the documents, the expiry dates and the reminders against the candidate record, to record consent, and to keep the audit trail intact.

This is where careful language matters more than anywhere else in the stack, because vendors routinely describe capabilities as certifications. Surhires supports configurable consent capture and retention windows, stores demographic data separately from the hiring record so it is not visible to recruiters, uses a fixed disposition list rather than free text so a decision can be reconstructed, supports opt-in capture and suppression for outbound messaging, and can check a job posting against salary-disclosure rules before it goes out. It records the data an independent bias audit needs where an automated employment decision tool is in scope.

None of that is a compliance declaration. Commissioning an audit, issuing candidate notice, registering an SMS brand and campaign with the carriers, and running the verification itself remain yours. Our SOC 2 work is a readiness programme with a Type I report as the first deliverable, and we do not claim a Type II report until one has been issued.

The joins that matter are few and predictable. Placement to pay and bill, so a signed placement creates the assignment record without re-keying. Time capture to pay and bill, which is usually the same vendor. Pay and bill to accounting. Front office to accounting for permanent placement invoices. Front office to job boards and to your email and calendar. Front office to screening providers.

The failure mode is almost always ownership of the master record. Two systems that both think they own the placement will disagree within a month, and reconciling them becomes somebody's permanent job. Decide before you integrate which system is authoritative for each object, write it down, and make the other system read rather than write.

Surhires's integration surface today covers job boards, email and calendar, messaging, accounting and screening providers, and each integration page carries an explicit state of Live, In development or Roadmap. We do not publish logos for partnerships that do not exist.

If your problem is that recruiters cannot find candidates, that submittals are untracked or that clients go quiet, you have a front-office problem and Surhires is a candidate. If your problem is that contractors are paid late, that invoices do not match approved time or that margin is unclear until month end, you have a pay and bill problem and you should not be reading a CRM comparison at all.

Most firms buy in that order: front office first, because it affects revenue generation, then pay and bill when contractor volume makes spreadsheets dangerous. Buying both from one vendor is possible and reduces the integration project, at the cost of accepting whichever half of the suite is weaker.