Invoices from four agencies every week
Your home uses two or three agencies, sometimes four when things are tight. Bookings are made by phone or text by whoever is in charge that day. Agency staff sign a paper timesheet at the end of the shift, or not. Invoices arrive weekly as PDFs, each laid out differently, some with a line per shift, some summarised.
The manager or administrator glances at them. The total is roughly what you expected. They get paid. Occasionally someone notices a night shift billed at a bank holiday rate, or a shift that was cancelled at 6am still on the invoice. That is only found because someone happened to remember.
Why checking falls through
To check an agency invoice properly you need three things together: what you booked, what was worked, and what the agreed rate is. In most homes those live in three different places: a booking text on someone's phone, a timesheet in a tray, and a rate card from last year in an email.
Bookings made under pressure are not written down consistently. The person approving the invoice is rarely the person who made the booking. Agencies send different formats. So matching is slow, and when it is slow it gets skipped.
Rate differences are the hardest to spot by eye: day, night, weekend and bank holiday rates, and different rates for nurses and care assistants, applied to hours that cross midnight.
What unchecked invoices cost
| Error type | How it happens |
|---|---|
| Wrong rate | Enhanced rate applied to an ordinary shift |
| Extra hours | Invoice longer than the signed timesheet |
| Cancelled shift billed | Cancellation made by phone, not recorded |
| Duplicate line | Same shift appears on two invoices |
| Wrong grade | Care assistant booked, nurse rate charged |
Many of these are honest mistakes on the agency's side. They still cost you money, and agencies generally correct them readily when you can show the booking and the timesheet.
How we match invoices to shifts
- A booking log where every agency request is recorded, whoever makes it: agency, date, shift times, grade, unit and the name of the person requesting. This also feeds the rota, so gaps show as covered.
- Cancellations recorded in the same log with the time, so a late cancellation is visible if the agency terms treat it differently.
- Digital timesheets signed on a tablet at the end of the shift by the agency worker and the nurse or senior in charge, replacing paper in the tray.
- Rate cards for each agency stored with their effective dates, so the correct rate is known for any shift.
- Invoice reading: PDFs and spreadsheets parsed into lines, with extraction checked against expected fields rather than trusted blindly.
- Matching of each line to booking, timesheet and rate, with any difference sent to an exceptions list, and clean invoices pushed to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks for approval.
We can also produce a monthly agency use report by unit and by reason, which helps when you look at whether permanent recruitment or bank staff would cover more shifts.
A normal week afterwards
Bookings and cancellations are written down at the time they happen. Agency workers sign out on the tablet. When invoices arrive, most lines match and go straight through. The administrator sees the few that do not, with the booking and timesheet beside each one, and sends a specific query to the agency.
You also get a clear view of how much agency cover each unit uses and why, which is hard to piece together from invoices alone.
Does this sound like your home?
- Agency bookings are made by text or phone and not logged
- Agency timesheets are paper and sometimes missing
- Invoices are approved by checking the total looks right
- You have found cancelled shifts billed more than once
- Nobody is sure which rate card is current