Pay and bill
Pay and bill is the back-office process that turns approved contractor time into two payments: what the agency pays the contractor and what it invoices the client. Both come from the same timesheet at different rates, and the difference is the agency's margin.
A pay and bill process has the same parts in every contract agency: the rates and rules agreed for each placement, the approved timesheets, client invoices, contractor payments by self-bill or by the contractor's own invoice, pay runs with remittance advices, the export to the accounts system, and credit control on what clients owe. Agencies that run these across separate tools spend a large part of each week re-keying the same numbers.
The rules are where the detail lives. A placement may pay and bill at a standard rate, an overtime multiplier above so many hours a day or a week, and a premium on bank holidays, with a policy on whether breaks are paid. Each rule has a pay side and a bill side, and a rule that exists on one side but not the other erodes margin silently. On an hourly contract at £40 pay and £50 bill, with time and a half after eight hours, a 10-hour day pays £440 and bills £550. If the multiplier was only set up on the pay side, the bill is £500 and £50 of margin disappears that day. Bank holiday premiums need the same pairing: if the contractor is paid a premium, the schedule should say whether the client pays one too.
Pay and bill also carries the cash gap. Contractors are usually paid weekly and clients pay on 30 days or longer. Twenty contractors on £550 a day are £55,000 of pay a week, so on 30-day terms an agency pays four or five weekly runs before the first client invoice for that work is due: £220,000 to £275,000 funded from its own cash or an invoice finance facility.
The failures are consistency failures. A rate changes in the CRM but not in the pay and bill system. A pay run pays a week whose invoice was credited. A remittance advice goes missing and the contractor chases for a payment already made. Each is a symptom of the same numbers living in more than one place.
How Vayora handles it
Vayora runs pay and bill from the placement. Pay and bill rule templates in account settings hold break policy and daily, weekly and holiday overtime, and each placement keeps a snapshot so editing a template never reprices weeks already billed. Agency approval of a timesheet raises the client invoice and the self-bill together and pushes both to Xero when it is connected. Pay runs gather the contractor pay for a period, produce a payment CSV and a remittance PDF per contractor, and net off any credit note that reversed pay.
Contract financeThe longer answer: How does the timesheet to invoice cycle work on a contract desk?