The hours were a guess by four o'clock Tuesday

A light industrial and logistics staffing firm runs roughly $120M in gross revenue across 22 branches in 11 states, with about 3,200 assignment employees in food plants, 3PL campuses, general assembly, and a third-shift sanitation crew. Five accounts carry half the revenue. It ran on Avionté for the front office, a mid-decade Dynamics GP ledger fed by a nightly CSV job, ADP for tax filing, client-owned clocks it could not see, a fax machine, and email for the rest.

• Nine recruiters and two payroll clerks worked a whiteboard of every crew whose hours had not landed, and whoever wiped it Tuesday morning erased the only record of what was missing
• A Saturday sign-in sheet from the Ohio plant sat in a supervisor's truck until Tuesday
• At 4 p.m. the run closed with roughly 11% of the workforce unresolved, so those hours were estimated from last week's schedule
• Every estimate became a Wednesday correction, at an industry average of $291 each
• Nobody could say what the firm made by client or assignment: rates sat in the front office, wages in payroll, and burden was allocated monthly at a blended rate

We ran a phased modernization, sequenced so the Tuesday guessing stopped first, then built out toward one operating picture running from hire to cash. The routing shipped beside Avionté and GP, so nothing switched off, no branch was retrained, and for six weeks the firm ran both Mondays side by side.

One record per worker, per day

Supplier interfaces, scheduled client clock exports, the punch app, and paper sheets keyed at the branch all resolve into one shape: a punch tied to an assignment, worker, site, and cost center. The whiteboard became one work list of every missing, duplicated, or wrongly approved hour, sorted by distance to cutoff and named to its owner.

The pay and bill rule engine

Bill rates, pay rates, overtime, differentials, and volume-tier markups moved out of email into configuration, each with an effective date, an approver, and an audit trail. The sanitation crew's third-shift differential, one line in a 2023 email taped inside a cabinet door, became a rule with a date on it.

Onboarding and compliance

Electronic I-9 with E-Verify, background screening returned against the worker record, and a start-confirmation step so a branch confirms a start when clearance is on file. Hours for a worker whose clearance has not landed are still captured, and the assignment goes to the branch and account manager that day.

Assignment-level margin and comp burden

Gross margin is calculated where it is earned. Each assignment carries employer taxes at the correct state, workers' compensation at the class code for that job, and overtime at what it cost, rather than a blended monthly allocation smeared across the branch. The same actual-hours record feeds the ACA measurement file.

Client invoicing and AR

Invoicing became a scheduled run off approved time rather than a week of assembly. Each client's format, consolidation level, and backup detail is configured once, and submitted hours reconcile against approved hours before an invoice is cut. The Excel rebuild and the re-key into the ledger stopped.

Analytics and redeployment

Margin by client, assignment, and class code for the CFO, and fill rate, overtime, and exception volume by site for branch managers. A model ranks ending assignments for redeployment and flags likely fill shortfalls a week out. The rankings are worklists, not automated outreach, and a person decides who gets the call.