Staffing and recruitment firms carry receivables that move faster than their clients' willingness to pay for them. When a host company stops settling invoices for placed temporary staff or contingency fees, the agency is exposed on a payroll it has already funded. Debt recovery for staffing and recruitment focuses on the invoices, timesheets and placement terms that make or break the claim once the client stops answering.
The pattern is consistent across markets. A client onboards temporary or contract workers through the agency, receives weekly or monthly invoices tied to timesheets, and pays the first cycle or two before falling behind. By the time the agency escalates, several invoice periods have accumulated, and the client has often moved the same workers onto a different arrangement or simply stopped responding to statements.
Recruitment placement fees follow a different shape: a single invoice raised on a candidate's start date, frequently disputed on a rebate clause if the candidate leaves within an agreed window. Both profiles sit inside cross-border debt recovery once the client and the agency are registered in different countries, which is common where staffing groups place workers across borders for a single project.
Signed timesheets or approved hours carry more weight than the invoice itself, because they show the client accepted the work performed. A master services agreement or framework contract setting out rates, payment terms and any rebate clause is the second pillar. Purchase orders, if the client's procurement process used them, close the gap between what was agreed and what was actually delivered.
For placement fees, the offer letter or start confirmation from the candidate matters as much as the invoice, since it fixes the date the rebate clock started running. Email correspondence in which the client acknowledged hours, approved a candidate, or promised payment on a set date turns a disputed invoice into an admitted one.
Underperformance of the placed worker is the most common defence, raised regardless of whether performance was ever documented at the time. A client will argue the candidate left within the rebate period to avoid the fee, even where the agency's records show a later departure date. Some clients claim the agency was never the contracting party, pointing to a group entity that signed the framework but did not raise the invoices.
Set-off against an unrelated dispute, usually a separate commercial disagreement with the same corporate group, appears frequently once formal demand is made. None of these defences survive contact with contemporaneous timesheets and a properly signed framework agreement; most survive only as long as the agency has no paper trail beyond the invoice.
Assessment starts with the invoice ledger, the framework agreement and whatever timesheets or approvals exist, reviewed against the client's country and its payment history with the agency. Where the debtor holds other unpaid balances with related suppliers in the same sector, that pattern changes the assessment, since a client failing several vendors at once behaves differently from one disputing a single invoice.
Formal demand follows, addressed to the contracting entity identified in the framework agreement rather than the group name on the client's letterhead. Where demand does not produce payment or a credible dispute, the file moves to litigation or, where a local step is required first, to admitted lawyers and licensed providers in the jurisdiction concerned. Clients who prefer to start with a documented picture of the debtor's position before committing to that route often begin with our asset and solvency check.
It depends on whether the client disputes the invoice or simply delays payment. A client with signed timesheets and no real dispute usually settles after formal demand; a genuine dispute over performance or entity moves the file toward litigation, which runs on the timetable of the local court.
Performance complaints raised only after non-payment carry little weight against signed timesheets showing hours were approved at the time. We assess whether the agency's records support the invoiced period before advising on the strength of that defence.
Yes. Placement fee disputes turn on the rebate clause and the candidate's actual start and departure dates, which is a different document set from timesheet-based invoicing, and we assess each on its own record.
An agency that has already funded a payroll on a client who has stopped paying carries that cost every week the invoice sits unresolved, while the contract terms that would prove the claim grow harder to locate the longer the file waits. Assessment against the framework agreement and the timesheet record establishes whether the balance is worth pursuing before any fee basis is agreed.