The front office half of a UK staffing stack

Candidate database with structured records and CV parsing. Client and contact records with terms, agreed fee percentages and rebate periods. Vacancy pipelines whose stages you configure per client and per assignment type. Submittals as first-class records rather than a status change. Interview coordination across a panel. Offer and placement records for both permanent and contract engagements. Placement invoicing for the agency fee or the margin.

On top of that sit twelve named AI agents doing specific jobs: turning a client brief into a structured vacancy, scoring candidates against it with visible reasoning, drafting first outreach from a candidate's actual history, classifying inbound replies, watching notice-period signals on a live offer, and flagging client accounts going quiet.

And the compliance fields a UK desk needs: IR35 status on contract placements, Right to Work document capture with expiry reminders, lawful basis and retention on candidate records.

No timesheet capture. No rate rules, overtime calculation, bank holiday uplifts or shift premiums. No pay and bill. No self-billing. No umbrella company integration. No PAYE, no RTI submissions, no pension auto-enrolment. No CIS. No credit control ledger. No HRIS, no employee records after the placement, no background checking, no assessments.

That list is longer than the feature list on most competitor pages, and it is deliberately here rather than buried in a terms document. If your primary problem is that your pay and bill is broken, this is not the product that fixes it, and a demo will waste your afternoon.

If your primary problem is that consultants are losing candidates, submittals are untracked, the database cannot be searched and nobody knows which client accounts are going quiet, that is the problem this product is built for.

The handoff point is the placement record. It carries the candidate, the client, the engagement type, the start date, the rate or salary, the margin or fee percentage, the payment terms and the rebate period. That is the data your back office needs to open a worker record and start billing.

Accounting connectors to QuickBooks and Xero cover the invoice side, and Stripe handles collection where you take card payment. For a pay and bill platform without a published connector, an export is the honest answer: a structured export of placements and their commercial terms on a schedule, imported by the back office. It is less impressive than a live sync and considerably more reliable than a badly maintained one.

Where a real integration exists we say so and date it. Where it does not, we describe the export rather than showing a logo and hoping nobody asks.

The suite argument is that one vendor means one data model, one contract and one support number. That is genuinely valuable and it is why the large staffing suites exist. The cost is that you take the weakest module along with the strongest, and in this category the front office is frequently the weakest module of a suite whose real strength is pay and bill.

The best-of-breed argument is that the front office is where your consultants spend eight hours a day, and a system they route around with spreadsheets is worse than an integration project. The cost is the integration project, and it is a real cost.

There is no universal answer. The useful test is which layer your firm loses money in today. If it is unbilled hours and payroll errors, buy the back office first. If it is lost candidates, untracked submittals and quiet client accounts, buy the front office first.

A realistic first month is: import the candidate and client database with column mapping, run duplicate detection during the import, configure the pipeline stages to match how each major client actually works, set the required fields including IR35 and Right to Work where they apply, connect email and calendar, and train the desk on the list views.

The parts that take longest are almost never technical. They are deciding on a standard disposition list the whole firm will use, agreeing which fields are mandatory before a submittal, and getting consultants to stop keeping a private spreadsheet. Software cannot do those for you, but a system that makes the required fields genuinely required helps more than a policy email does.

Onboarding on the higher tiers carries a one-time fee scoped at the point of sale, because a clean CSV import and a fifteen-year migration are not the same job.

Three plans with a three-seat minimum on Starter and Professional and five on Enterprise. Sterling figures on the pricing page are conversions from the USD list price and flagged as unconfirmed. VAT is excluded and its treatment depends on your registration status because the supplier is a US entity. Fourteen-day trial, no card, no free-forever tier.

Support runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm Eastern Time. The United States is the commercial launch market; the United Kingdom is supported inbound. That is stated on every UK page on this site for the same reason it is stated here.