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Recruitment Giant Experiences Business Transformation Through Pay & Bill Services

CASE STUDY:

Recruitment Giant Experiences Business Transformation Through Pay & Bill Services

The client is one of the largest and fastest growing recruitment companies in the UK, with frequent mergers and acquisitions. As the company rapidly expands business by acquiring more brands, a strong pay & bill function is essential for delivering a delightful candidate experience and ensuring inflow of cash from clients.

Business objectives

A giant in the industry, the client deals with huge volumes – processing more than 300,000 timesheets annually. Our client’s previous engagement for pay & bill services was via onshore shared service model.  They were now looking for an experienced offshore partner, who could help reduce costs and improve efficiency. Their key expectations from outsourcing to QX were:

  • Improve pay & bill accuracy, reduce queries to deliver a better candidate experience, and enable quick cash collections.
  • Optimise and accelerate the invoicing process to reduce unbilled amount.
  • Streamline processes and build a ‘plug-and-play’ model to easily integrate services for newly acquired brands.

QX Solution

QX established a highly skilled team with relevant experience in Payroll (processing paper and online timesheets) and Billing (direct and self-bill). Over the first few months, we stabilised and optimised the process, ensuring easy integration for newly acquired brands. During the next phase, the following initiatives played an instrumental role in enabling our client to achieve their objectives:

  • Accurate processing: Timesheet processing efficiency level of 99.5% achieved within months of relationship; improved and maintained at 99.8% within a year.
  • Improved query management: Improved accuracy helped reduce query rates. Additionally, the team increased frequency of candidate bookings downloads, supply master and candidate master activities to twice a day (up from once a week previously), ensuring availability of real time data to match with timesheets.
  • Automating VMS: Working for close to 20 brands, the team had to login, download and standardise data from over 200 client portals. Working closely with the client’s team, QX automated this activity for almost half of the portals with the highest volume.
  • Diligent overpayment chasing: Following the principle of ‘least delay in chasing’, the QX team diligently chased candidate and umbrella overpayments on a weekly basis. As a part of this process, overpayment from any week is reported by Friday EOD and chased on Monday without fail.
  • Improved efficiency: Helped business reduce FTE count, while adding 3 brands and managing increased volume of online portals without increasing FTE counts.
  • Improved invoicing and allocation: By rotating shift time for some of the employees, we managed to complete payroll before our SLA time. This enabled the treasury team to upload invoices for invoice discounting on bank portal. Additionally, the team proactively chases clients for self-bills and allocating these into the system, further boosting efficiency.

Alongside pay & bill, QX also successfully manages DE payroll for a number of our client’s NHS trust partners.

Benefits

  • Reduced query rates owing to improved payroll accuracy and process improvement.
  • Reduced unbilled amount by more than 70%, bringing it down to the lowest till date for the clients. Achieved zero unbilled for permanent and DE (Direct Engagement).

Significant productivity gains via process optimization and automation have allowed us to integrate new brands into the system without expanding team size, especially for billing, credit checks and DE payroll.