Getting paid
A placement is not a status. It is a fee with three months of consequences.
Most trackers record that somebody was placed and stop. The money after that point — the guarantee, the slice you should not have spent yet, the commission you already paid a recruiter for a hire that did not stick — lives in a spreadsheet and a difficult conversation.
When you record it
The terms arrive with it, and each number says where it came from.
Recording a placement resolves the client's agreed terms for that date and that role band. The guarantee period pre-fills. The retention holdback is computed from the agreed percentage.
And each figure carries a label saying whether it came from the rate card, from a default, or from a person typing — which is the difference between a number you can invoice against and a number somebody will query.
- Earned this quarter₹4,80,000three placements closed
- Pending the guarantee₹1,26,000releases as each window closes clean
- Paid₹3,54,000
- Reversed₹42,000one breach, clawed back automatically
Then the guarantee runs
Held back, and released without anybody remembering to.
A slice of the fee is reserved against the invoice for the guarantee period. If the window closes clean, it releases overnight and the placement flips to satisfied on its own. Nobody diarised it and nobody chased it.
If it breaks, one action does four things: the state flips, the replacement links back to the original, a credit note drafts through your normal approval route, and every commission accrual already paid on that placement gets a reversing entry. That last one is the part that has cost agencies real money.
- A waive path for the ones you settled by hand —
Not every broken guarantee ends in a credit note. Recording it as waived keeps the state honest without generating paperwork you already negotiated away.
- Commission can trigger on cash, not on close —
Pay when the client pays, if that is how your scheme works. Both are wired.
- Plans can be dry-run —
See what a commission scheme would pay before you apply it to anybody.
- Contractors are paid a different way on purpose —
A payable invoice with its own withholding, and deliberately outside the commission engine so nobody is paid twice for the same placement.
The invoice
Tax-aware, and idempotent.
The draft carries the intra-state or inter-state split, and withholding tax is applied by default on recruitment services — overridable per client, because somebody always has a certificate. Pressing draft twice returns the same invoice rather than a second one.
After that it is ordinary finance: receivables, ageing, dunning. Which is the point of having it in the same product.
- Splits can go to an office or a cost centre —
Not only to a person, which is how multi-branch firms actually account for a desk.
- Your client signs the invoice off —
Approve or dispute from their own portal, under a one-time code, with a dispute required to carry a reason.
Straight about the edges
Three limits worth knowing before you model your scheme on it.
›Can we split a fee between the sourcer, the submitter and the closer?
You can record all of them, and today only the closer's split drives a payout. Recording a sourcer is currently documentation, not compensation. If your scheme pays sourcers, raise it before you buy.
›Are the splits captured automatically as the work happens?
No. The closer is seeded when you record the placement; everyone else is entered by hand afterwards.
›Is margin on a contract placement a field?
No. Bill rate and pay rate live on the role, so both sides of the margin are on the record — but there is no computed margin field anywhere in hiring, and timesheet-driven contract billing is out of scope today.
›Does GST get applied automatically?
The split is built and correct once your legal entity and rates are set up. Until they are, the draft passes through what it is given. Worth ten minutes at onboarding rather than a surprise on invoice one.
›Can a recruiter see their own commission?
Yes — earned, pending, paid, with a drill-down into what produced each figure, and reversals visible rather than silent.
- Record a placement and watch the terms resolve off the rate card
- Find the label saying where each number came from
- Mark a guarantee breached and follow the credit note
- Then find the commission that was reversed