The Case for Change: Modernising Recruitment Finance
By Katie Maw, Percipient
Like most industries, recruitment is in constant flux. Economic uncertainty, market fluctuations, wage pressures and an ongoing global skills crisis are converging to create increasingly complex operating pressures for agencies of all sizes. Against this backdrop, it’s easy for firms to become reactive. But long-term resilience depends on stepping back and reassessing priorities and risks.
This includes asking strategic questions such as:
- Where are the most significant opportunities?
- How can we redirect resources when something goes wrong?
- Are our current systems capable of supporting agility and stability?
For many agencies, the honest answer is no because their operational backbone is still built on manual processes and spreadsheets.
The Real-World Cost of Legacy Finance
Despite their familiarity, spreadsheet-based finance in recruitment introduces serious risks. They slow performance, create data blind spots, and prevent leadership teams from accessing the real-time insights needed to steer the business confidently.
Recent research reflects the real-world cost of this. Professional services firms are losing substantial time and resources to manual financial processes, mainly due to gaps in their systems. Every finance professional surveyed reported encountering discrepancies in year-end financials, with 77% stating these issues occur frequently and that firms lose 44 hours per week as a result.
Finance Challenges Holding Recruitment Firms Back
1 Cash-Flow Management
Revenue in recruitment can be unpredictable, making it challenging to maintain a stable cash flow without accurate, real-time financial insight.
2 Invoicing Clients
Accurate, timely invoicing is essential for client relationships, cash flow and credit management, but is often slowed by manual processes and fragmented data.
3 Regulatory Compliance
The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving and increasingly difficult to comply with without dedicated systems. Manual errors are inevitable and can be costly.
4 Monitoring Expenses
Tracking and validating expenses manually is time-consuming and prone to oversight, yet essential for profitability and control.
5 Contractor Payments
Managing contractor pay can be complex, particularly when navigating constant changes to UK tax legislation and compliance requirements.
Building a Data-Driven Finance Culture
Eliminating spreadsheet-based finance in recruitment isn’t just about reducing risk. It equips firms with the structure and intelligence needed to drive efficiency, agility, and scale to support long-term planning and performance.
The right culture, led from the top and supported by the right platform, is key, as Broster Buchanan’s Head of Finance, Helen Spring, explains:
One of our major objectives in adopting a new finance platform was to give the board access to live dashboards. Several years on, that’s exactly what we’re doing, and the exec team loves interacting with the intelligence-rich reports we’ve created. Sage Intacct has been a real catalyst for cultural change. We’ve embraced a new mindset in how we access and use data. The team has seen the value of better insights, and their appetite for more has grown. We’ve moved from pushing reports out to stakeholders to them coming to us asking for deeper insights. This empowerment delivers real commercial advantage.
Transforming Finance with Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct removes inaccuracies, inefficiencies and manual processes by bringing the following benefits to recruiters:
- Integration – Seamless integration with systems such as CRM and sales platforms delivers true end-to-end visibility. Real-time data paints an accurate performance picture, supporting stronger and faster decision-making.
- Multi-Dimensional Accounting – Track financials by client, job type, recruiter or any relevant dimension, enabling precise profitability and performance analysis across the business.
- Project Accounting – Monitor costs and revenues per client, job or project; support time and expense tracking; and analyse profitability by role, department or client.
- Subscription & Contract Billing – Automate recurring billing, manage contract lifecycles, and streamline revenue recognition for retainer or fixed-fee arrangements.
- Flexible Reporting & Dashboards – Customisable, real-time dashboards provide insights into client profitability, billable vs. non-billable hours, revenue forecasting, recruiter performance and more.
Start Replacing Spreadsheets in Recruitment
To learn how Sage Intacct can bring greater efficiency, agility and intelligence to your recruitment finance processes, get in touch or call us 01606 871332.