Validating Gaps in Time-Billed to Time-Worked with Workforce Intelligence

 

Today’s enterprises face growing pressure to do more with less. At the same time, the workforce has become more complex as distributed teams, hybrid schedules, and outsourced vendors have become the norm. As organizations increasingly depend on contingent labor and third-party services to augment and scale their workforce, gaining clear visibility into labor spend has become an essential business priority.   

 

Why Contingent Labor Invoicing Visibility is So Important

Vendor oversight remains one of the biggest blind spots in enterprise labor strategy. Most contingent workers report time manually. And far too often, client companies accept it with minimal verification. Sapience has found that, on average, 30–45% of billed contractor hours are for time with no corresponding work activity at all.  Taking advantage of these cost implications can provide significant returns for companies with true visibility into this time billed vs time worked discrepancy.  

 

Below are examples of what Sapience Workforce Intelligence clients have achieved:

 

• A U.S. bank saved $6.8M by renegotiating vendor contracts.
• A global enterprise secured a $12M rebate after identifying 70% inactivity across one outsourced team.
• One client recovered $18M in overbilling through Sapience-enabled audits of time-based billing.
• On average, across all Sapience clients 30–45% of billed contractor hours are for time with no corresponding work activity at all.

 

This percentage discrepancy is increasing steadily as service providers expand their use of AI tools to make their teams more efficient but fail to pass this savings on to clients.

 

Why Self-Reporting Time Is an Inaccurate Measure of Time Worked (and Time Billed)

Most labor-based services rely on contractor self-reporting and manager approval to validate time worked – a process riddled with risk. In many organizations, the process looks like this:

 

• A contractor enters their hours in a Vendor Management System (VMS)
• A manager approves the time based on a general sense of the work done
• The invoice is paid, often without deeper scrutiny

 

The core challenge is that supplier self-reporting, combined with manager approval, does not guarantee that billed hours equate to hours worked or value delivered. Suppliers often operate under hourly billing models that create inherent incentives to maximize logged hours. Meanwhile, managers tasked with approving timesheets typically lack real-time insight or objective data to validate whether the recorded hours truly reflect productive effort – and in too many cases, whether billed work occurred at all.

 

This approach assumes trust but lacks objective verification. The tools and processes companies rely on are designed for tracking and automation – not authentication. Despite an awareness of this vulnerability, the exposure persists due to:

 

• Over reliance on trust – supplier relationships are often long-standing and trusted, leading to a reluctance to independently verify time entries other than by a front-line manager with only a general sense of real contractor work effort
• Diffused accountability – procurement, business units, and finance all play a role; but often none are clearly responsible for validating time
• Managerial blind spots – managers lack tools, time, and an independent reliable data source to verify time-cards and as a byproduct, approvals become routinely automatic
• Tooling misconceptions – many companies believe their VMS or ERP system is enough, mistaking workflow automation for oversight
• Not aware there is a proven workforce intelligence solution like Sapience that has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars of direct value to many of the world’s largest companies

 

Without the right tools and approaches, validation efforts become either superficial or resisted, leaving the approval process a procedural formality rather than a meaningful control.  Ignoring this gap exposes companies to:

 

1. Financial risk through overpayment for unworked or under-delivered time
2. Contract overruns, and diminished supplier accountability
3. Hampered ability to shift time-based procurement models toward outcome or deliverable-based agreements

 

Closing the Time Reporting Gap Creates Savings, and Optimizes Performance

By investing in workforce intelligence that measure engagement, application usage, and work patterns, leaders can correlate supplier-reported hours with actual labor activity. These insights enable swift identification of anomalies and potential over-billing, as well as support continuous supplier performance improvement.   However, most workforce tools are optimized for either full-time employees or contractors—and few excel at both. The SapienceIQ workforce intelligence platform is designed for modern enterprise complexity, enabling unified visibility across the entire labor ecosystem.

 

Benefits of Workforce Intelligence for the Modern Enterprise

SapienceIQ is a privacy-first, enterprise-leading platform that passively collects activity data from endpoints such as laptops, virtual machines, and desktops used by third-party labor.  Importantly, specific keystroke data, screen captures, or any kind of data input is NOT captured by Sapience. The Sapience system captures signals such as active application usage, mouse and keyboard interactions, and time spent in work-relevant tools to build a comprehensive picture of how work is being performed.  The Sapience platform also integrates seamlessly with existing VMS and project management systems and enhances current workflows.

 

The collected data is aggregated, anonymized where necessary, and visualized through powerful insights and recommendations that give procurement teams, operations leaders, and supplier or contingent workforce managers a fact-based view of work patterns, productivity trends, and time utilization.

 

SapienceIQ enables organizations to:

 

• Validate reported time
• Improve supplier accountability
• Identify high-performing vendors
• Uncover hidden productivity losses

 

Sapience Reveals Measurable Savings Opportunities

At Sapience, we believe the greatest and fastest path to unlocking transformative value lies in closing the gap between self-reported time and actual time worked. Our SapienceIQ platform complements existing spend database initiatives, and delivers faster, deeper, and more sustainable cost savings.

 

Sapience empowers organizations with accurate, privacy-conscious data to make better business decisions. This workforce intelligence gives Operations, Procurement and Finance teams the power to negotiate from a data-backed position of strength.

 

For a discussion with a workforce intelligence expert schedule a time that works best for you.   We look forward to talking with you.