Tracking Timesheets Across Every Client Site Your Temps Cover

Every hour a placed worker logs has to work for both the agency's own payroll and the client's invoice approval, and those two processes don't always move at the same pace. A worker might complete a shift on Friday, but if the client's site supervisor doesn't sign off on the hours until the following Tuesday, the agency is stuck choosing between running payroll on unconfirmed hours or delaying pay until approval comes through, neither of which is a great option for the worker waiting to get paid.

Deputy's shift-based structure maps naturally onto how a staffing agency actually works: a temp worker gets assigned to a defined placement, a shift or block of shifts at a specific client site, and that assignment can change from one placement to the next without rebuilding a schedule from scratch. For an agency juggling dozens of active placements across different clients simultaneously, being able to see at a glance who's assigned where, and swap coverage when a worker can't make a shift, is close to the core of the job.

Because a placed worker's hours directly become a client invoice, having a verified, timestamped punch record matters more here than in almost any other hourly business. Buddy Punch's GPS geofencing can confirm a worker actually clocked in at the client's address, not somewhere else, which becomes valuable evidence if a client ever disputes hours on an invoice. For an agency that's had a client push back on a timesheet before, that verification pays for itself quickly.

Neither tool automatically gets a client supervisor's approval on a worker's hours, but both can be set up with an approval step before hours are finalized. The agencies that avoid billing disputes tend to build this in deliberately: a client-side contact reviews and approves hours within a set window, and the agency's own payroll and invoicing only proceed once that approval is in. Skipping this step to move faster usually costs more time later untangling a disputed invoice than it saves upfront.

A client sign-off step can be built in this way:

1. Confirm with the vendor whether your plan lets an external reviewer see and approve hours, since client-facing approval is not universal across tiers.
2. Set an approval step before hours are finalized, so nothing moves to payroll or invoicing while a timesheet is still open.
3. Give a client-side contact a set window to review and approve each worker's hours.
4. Proceed with payroll and client invoicing only once that approval is recorded, so disputes surface before the invoice goes out.

It's common for a placed worker to split a week between two client sites, especially in a light industrial or administrative staffing book. Tag hours by client and placement, not just by worker, so each client's invoice reflects only the hours actually worked at their site. A single undifferentiated weekly total forces someone to manually split it after the fact, usually from memory, which is exactly the kind of reconstruction that leads to billing errors and client disputes.

A staffing agency running five or ten active client placements can manage scheduling and approvals fairly informally, a shared spreadsheet, a few phone calls. Past that point, the coordination overhead of tracking who's placed where, whose hours need approval from which client contact, and which invoices are still pending, grows faster than headcount does. That's usually the trigger to move from an informal process onto one of these tools rather than trying to scale the spreadsheet further.

Even with a solid process, a client will occasionally push back on a specific worker's billed hours, and how the agency responds matters as much as who's right. Having the verified punch record ready, timestamped, geofenced, with the client site attached, turns a potential argument into a quick documentation check instead of a drawn-out back-and-forth built on competing recollections. Agencies that can resolve a dispute within a day or two by simply pulling the record tend to keep client relationships intact far better than ones that have to promise to look into it and follow up next week.

Build the habit of pulling that documentation proactively whenever a client's site supervisor seems even mildly uncertain about a specific week's hours, rather than waiting for a formal dispute to escalate before checking the record.