Back office
Contractor payroll services and back office support
Running contractors and temporary workers creates real administrative work. Timesheets have to be chased and approved. Rates, contracts and end dates have to be tracked. Invoices have to be raised, matched and reconciled. Everyone has to be paid correctly and on time, every cycle, without exception.
None of that work is optional, and almost none of it is anyone's actual job. It lands on a founder, an operations lead, or a finance team of one — people whose time is worth considerably more than the task. This service takes it off them.
What it covers
Three parts, one operation
Payroll, invoicing and workforce management are usually treated as three separate problems, solved in three separate places. Handled together, each one stops creating work for the other two.
Payroll management and processing
The payroll cycle run end to end for contractors and temporary workers: timesheets collected and approved, the engagement type handled correctly, and people paid accurately and on schedule.
Invoicing software
Invoicing run through proper software rather than spreadsheets and a shared inbox, with an audit trail from approved timesheet through to payment and reconciliation.
Workforce management
A single view of who is engaged, on what rate, under which contract and until when — with renewals and end dates visible well before they become urgent.
Payroll
Payroll management and processing
Contractor and temporary worker payroll runs on a cycle, and the cycle does not move. Time is submitted for the period, approved by whoever is responsible on your side, and processed for payment. Approved time is the only thing that gets paid, so the approval step doubles as your spend control — nothing reaches payment that somebody with authority has not signed off.
The engagement type matters throughout. A PAYE temporary worker and a limited company contractor are not processed the same way, and getting that wrong is not a minor administrative slip. Part of the value of running this properly is that the treatment follows the engagement automatically rather than depending on somebody remembering which arrangement applies to which person.
Why reliable payment is commercial, not just administrative
Contractors talk to each other, and they remember who pays properly. Late or incorrect payment is one of the fastest ways to lose access to good people — not because of a dispute, but because when the next assignment comes up they quietly take the other one. A payroll operation that simply works, every cycle, is part of why strong contractors come back to you and recommend you to others. It is one of the few pieces of back office that has a direct effect on the quality of the people available to you.
Invoicing
Invoicing software, not spreadsheets
Most contractor invoicing starts life in a spreadsheet and a shared inbox, and it works right up until it does not. The failure is rarely dramatic. It is a duplicate invoice, a rate that was updated in one place but not the other, a payment nobody can match to an assignment, or a month-end where finance is reconstructing what happened from email threads.
Running invoicing through dedicated software removes that entire category of problem. Approved time flows through to the invoice rather than being re-keyed, which means the invoice reflects what was actually approved and not what somebody transcribed at the end of the month.
A continuous audit trail
Every line traces back: approved timesheet, to invoice, to payment, to reconciliation. When somebody asks why a particular figure appears on a particular invoice, the answer is a lookup rather than an investigation. That matters most at month-end, at year-end, and in the specific moment when a contractor queries a payment — which is exactly when nobody has time to go digging through a spreadsheet's revision history.
Visibility
Workforce management
Once you are running more than a few contractors, the hardest question to answer quickly is the simplest one: who is currently engaged, on what rate, under which contract, and until when. Workforce management is a single view that answers it.
The immediate benefit is that renewals and end dates become visible in advance. An assignment ending in three weeks is a decision you get to make deliberately, with time to extend, replace or wind down. The same assignment discovered on its final Friday is a scramble, and scrambles are expensive — either in continuity or in the rate you end up agreeing under pressure.
The true cost of flexible headcount
Flexible headcount is easy to add and easy to lose track of. With every assignment, rate and end date in one place, the current cost of your contingent workforce is available whenever you need it, rather than being assembled for a board pack once a quarter. That changes the conversation about flexible hiring from a guess into a number — which is usually what is needed before anyone will approve the next engagement.
Who it is for
Who this suits
Scaling a contingent workforce
Companies growing the number of contractors and temporary workers they engage, who do not want to add finance or operations headcount purely to service the administration that comes with it.
Outgrown the spreadsheet
Teams whose contractor admin has quietly passed the point a spreadsheet can carry it. The usual signal is that nobody is confident the spreadsheet is current, and everybody is a little worried about the month it turns out not to be.
Recruiting elsewhere
Businesses who source their own contractors, or use other agencies, and need the back office only. This is a standalone service — there is no requirement to recruit through us to use it.
Together
How this works alongside recruitment
Where we also handle the hiring, the two sides join up: the person we place arrives with their rate, contract and end date already on the record, so there is no separate onboarding exercise to get them into your payroll and no re-keying of terms that were already agreed during the search. Where we do not, nothing changes — the back office runs on whoever you engage, however you found them.
The recruitment side is set out on our contract and temporary hiring page, and the full range of engagement models on our services page.
FAQ
Common questions
Can you provide back office support if we source our own contractors?
Yes. This can be taken as a standalone service with no recruitment attached. If you already have people you like working with, or you hire your contractors through another route entirely, we can still run the payroll cycle, the invoicing and the assignment records for them. The administration is the same work whether or not we introduced the person.
How do timesheets and approvals work?
Contractors submit time for the period, the person responsible on your side approves it, and approved time is what flows through to payment and invoicing. Nothing is paid on an unapproved timesheet, so the approval step is where your budget control sits. The exact approval structure — who signs off, at what frequency, and whether it is per project or per manager — is set up to match how your business already works.
How does this interact with IR35?
Back office administration is downstream of the IR35 determination, not a substitute for it. The status determination for an engagement remains yours as the end client. What the back office does is make sure the engagement is then processed consistently with that determination — the right engagement type on the record, the right payment route, and documentation that matches. If you want to talk through how a specific arrangement should be handled, that is a conversation worth having before the assignment starts rather than after.
What happens at renewal or the end of an assignment?
Every assignment carries its end date in the workforce record, so renewals surface as something to decide on rather than something that gets noticed when a contractor asks. At renewal the rate, dates and contract are updated and the assignment continues. At the end of an assignment the final timesheet is approved, the last payment and invoice run through, and the record is closed off so it stops appearing in your live headcount cost.
Can you handle both PAYE temporary workers and limited company contractors?
Both engagement types come with different processing requirements, and the intention is that your back office covers the mix you actually run rather than forcing everyone into one model. What that looks like in practice depends on how your contractors are currently engaged and what you already have in place, so it is worth walking through your specific setup with us.
How quickly can it be set up?
It depends on your setup — how many people you are running, how they are engaged, what payment cycle you are on and what you are moving from. A handful of contractors on a clean monthly cycle is a very different exercise from migrating an established mixed workforce mid-quarter. Rather than quote a timeline that may not survive contact with your situation, tell us what you are running today and we will be straight with you about what it takes.
Get in touch
Tell us what you are running
Send us a short outline of how many contractors you engage and how they are currently administered, and we will come back to you within one working day. You can also contact us directly, or start with the full brief through client onboarding.