Flexible labor and agile decision-making are critical to the current business environment. So, it makes sense that contingent workers have taken center stage. For many organizations, this type of labor is a big part of the company’s strategy, as well as a significant investment. So, it’s no surprise that business leaders want to verify key requirements like work time are being met.

Work time verification allows companies to ensure the accuracy of reported hours and maintain transparency in their engagements with contract workers. As a result, they can properly assess whether they are receiving value for money, avoid overpaying for services, reduce risk, and cultivate productive partnerships with their contingent workforce suppliers.

The Need for Verifying Worktime

Contingent workers are increasingly in demand. In fact, recent data reveals that they now make up 30% to 50% of the overall workforce. So, like permanent employees, the performance of contingent workers needs to be carefully measured—particularly in respect of time worked.

By verifying actual worktime against invoices, you can objectively confirm the receipt of services on the part of your contingent workforce. All in all, worktime verification sets internal controls that will help minimize financial loss. It also helps ensure transparency, enabling you to get the most out of contingent labor investments. In the long run, this will protect your company from financial challenges and better position leaders for future supplier decisions.

Leverage Actual Worktime to Improve Three-Way Match

Invoice verification is a vital step when it comes to accounts payable (AP). A three-way match is one of the most effective ways of achieving this.

Three-way matching is a control mechanism that aims to validate whether the services received align with the purchase order and invoice amount. It compares three key documents:

• Purchase order (PO). This generally serves as an official confirmation authorizing a purchase.
• Order receipt. The process of verifying the items in the PO are received.
• Invoice. This is a request for payment sent by the supplier, comprising the same information as the PO, as well as contact information, payment schedules, and total amount to be paid, which should match the order receipt.

The three-way matching process is critical for validating these transactions and making sure that your company receives the items for which you paid. By implementing this alongside worktime verification, you can:

• Reduce incorrect payments and better manage your contingent workforce spend, by not paying for hours invoiced but not worked.
• Mitigate the risk of fraud, including unauthorized transactions, thanks to an auditable trail of documentation that serves to establish accountability in the accounts payable process.
• Optimize AP operations by streamlining and automating the verification process before payments are made.

Trust, But Verify: Are You Getting Value from Your Contingent Workforce Contracts?

Verifying work time is meant to help you implement transparent policies and foster a culture of accountability in the workplace.

The “trust, but verify” approach provides a comprehensive picture of actual work time and uses data to manage the cost of contingent staffing. Moreover, it can help you realize a variety of other benefits such as:

Understanding True Work Time

Taking a closer look at the time your contingent workers spend on each task or project is a great way to understand work patterns and identify areas for improvement. By verifying time spent and assessing it alongside metrics such as work quality and productivity, you gain deeper insights into operational performance. This is critical in preventing time wastage and overspending.

Identifying and Correcting Billing Errors

Invoicing can be a complicated process. As such, it’s hardly surprising that companies encounter errors—such as accidental overcharges, overlapping invoices, and duplicate invoices—from time to time. That said, without the right solution these errors may end up being very costly.

Through work time verification and verifying the actual time that contingent workers spend on projects, you can quickly identify and correct the timecard and avoid overbilling for hours not worked. This allows you to reach out to your suppliers and take corrective actions to ensure accurate payments.

Sapience transparenSEE: The Value of Time Verification

The gig economy is here to stay. In the coming years, an increasing number of companies—and industries—will likely find themselves relying on the services of contingent workers. As such, now is the time to future-proof your organization by implementing a work time verification process with a reliable contingent workforce solution like Sapience transparenSEE.

Sapience transparenSEE is a single-platform, industry-agnostic solution built to help companies gain visibility into workforce data. It can be used to measure KPIs, assess business risks, manage workload capacity, as well as reduce overtime. This minimizes overall operational costs and optimizes business processes.

To learn more about what the Sapience transparenSEE platform can do for your organization, request a demo today.