Job&Talent is based on an invoicing model instead of subscription and clients pay on standard 30,60 or 90 day terms. Compared to other HR software providers however, Job&Talent directly hires and pays the temporary workers it places on the behalf of clients which means there is a delay between worker payroll and client billing. This can result in cash flow issues, especially if errors are made or client payments are late.

After mapping the user journey with internal invoicing admins we realised a big part of the problem was the reliance on an inflexible and mostly off product invoice process which made it very difficult to identify, track and follow up on late invoices as well as be clear on what had already been paid.

The first goal therefore, was to bring the end-to-end invoice journey from generation to being fully paid into the product. The vision afterwards, was to then develop a client view of the data and use that to encourage a move towards a more weekly or daily invoicing model using incentives, thereby reducing the cash flow discrepancy and reducing the financing costs required to support daily operations.

The biggest headwind on this project was trying to find the right balance between flexibility and simplicity. We could see from working closely with our invoicing admins that there was a lot of variety in the way clients invoices were setup and configured previously.

Some wanted a proforma first but others didn’t and the way each client wanted to split the invoices by entity differed a lot (by workplace, by workplace and cost concept, by each and every cost concept across workplaces, by legal entity etc). Trying to support all the possible configuration combinations lead to an overly complex user experience such that when we shared it in reviews with senior leadership it was rejected multiple times and we were continually asked to simplify. When we took this back to the working team and stakeholders however, we had to work with the practicalities of current operations and client contracts. It was It took several attempts to get the model to a point that both sides – leadership (vision) and invoicing admins (daily operations) would accept and find intuitive. I supported the IC on my team a lot during this process as we worked through the positives and negatives of each iteration and refined our approach together. We eventually settled on a legal entity centric model which offered a slightly more restricted approach whilst making sure we could cover 70-80% of the client configurations in terms of invoice breakdown and bill splitting required.