Guide
Staffing CRM and Worker App for Swedish Staffing Agencies
A staffing agency sells hours: a worker on a client's site, a shift pattern, an approval, a payslip. Here is how those sit in one system instead of five.
What does a staffing agency need from a system?
Three things in one place: the order and the client who pays for it, the placement and the worker whose hours fill it, and the approval that turns those hours into an invoice and a payslip. Most agencies run those three on a spreadsheet, an inbox and a payroll bureau. The cost is not the admin. It is the hour that reaches payroll with no approval trail behind it.
Where a staffing week actually goes wrong
The hours are written on paper at the client's site, photographed, and sent to the office. Someone types them into a payroll file. The client approves them later, in a mail thread, often after payroll has already run. The invoice is built from a third version of the same week. Three numbers, one week, and no single record that says which one is right.
Every one of those handoffs is a place where a correction turns into a dispute. The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is making one set of hours travel through the client's approval, the invoice basis and the payroll run without being retyped at any step.
The three records that have to stay linked
The client and the order
One record per client company, one order per assignment: the role, the number of workers, the period, the shift pattern, the bill rate and the pay agreement. The order is what an invoice and a placement both point at.
The placement
One worker on one order, with the hours a week and the bill rate. It is the record the timesheet hangs from, so hours can never be logged against the wrong client.
The worker
Employment start, contract, pay agreement and phone app access in one place. The worker sees today's placement and logs the shift. You see the hours waiting for approval.
Consultancy tools stop at the order, because a consultant's time is billed from a monthly allocation. Staffing needs the placement in between: it is what ties an hourly worker to one client for one period, and it is why a worker can log a shift without choosing a client at all.
Client approval the client can actually do
The person who signs off hours at the client is a site manager, not a software user. They will not create an account to approve a week. So the approval has to arrive as a link, show the week per worker with the shifts and the total, and offer approve or reject with a reason.
What the client approves is then what the agency finalizes. A rejection goes back to the worker in the phone app with the reason attached, the worker corrects and resubmits, and the change is on the record. Time that was never sent to a client can still be finalized directly, with the override and its reason written to the audit trail.
This is the difference between a signature and a trail. When an invoice is questioned three months later, the answer is the same week the client approved, not a mail thread somebody has to find.
Swedish pay rules, not just hours
OB supplements by time window, overtime steps, sick pay, karens and vacation percentage are part of the pay agreement, and they are applied when the hours are collected rather than at the end of the month. The payslip lines and the cause codes you send to Fortnox come from the same calculation the payroll run shows you.
A pay agreement published as a template is a starting point, not a certified agreement. Treat the numbers in it as a draft to check against your own collective agreement before the first real payroll run.
Hours from a phone, by the person who worked them
The worker opens a link, sees today's placement and logs the shift. Hours, breaks and cause codes are on the record the moment they are saved, not a week later when somebody reconstructs them. A rejection from the client comes back with its reason.
The worker app is included rather than sold per active user. For an agency running a few hundred placements a month, per-seat pricing on the people who only ever log time is the part of the bill that never stops growing.
Hiring as part of the same flow
A job post, a career page on your workspace address, applications that arrive without an account, and stages a recruiter can move in one step. When someone is hired, the same person becomes a worker with an employment start and a placement, instead of a second record typed into another tool.
For permanent placements and search work, the recruiting and executive search guide covers the candidate relationship side, which is a different job from filling shifts.
The first week, in order
Publish a career page and one job post
The career page lives on your own workspace address, so applications arrive without an account and without a CV in an inbox.
Add the default pay agreement
OB supplements, overtime steps and the vacation percentage sit in the agreement, not in a spreadsheet. Payroll refuses to run without one, which is the point.
Add a client and their approver
The client gets a link to approve their workers' hours for the week. You finalize what they approved and the invoice is based on the same lines.
Invite the first worker
The worker opens the link once and logs shifts from a phone. No app to install and no seat to buy for the people doing the work.
What this is not
- Not a payroll bureau. It collects approved hours, applies the agreement you configured and sends the lines to Fortnox; the salary run itself stays with your payroll partner.
- Not an applicant tracking system for hundreds of concurrent ad campaigns. It handles job posts, applications and hiring for the roles you actually fill.
- Not a replacement for a collective agreement. You still need one, and someone who reads it.
Who this is for
Staffing and recruitment agencies placing hourly workers on client sites, from a handful of large accounts to a few hundred placements a month, in Sweden or in a market with similar shift and overtime rules. It fits agencies that already have a payroll partner and want the week between the shift and the payslip to stop being manual.