For staffing agencies

Pay by assignment. Bill by contract. Know your margin.

Staffing runs on the gap between what you bill and what you pay. Stratum builds the back office around that gap, from the timesheet a client approves to the invoice it pays.

Request a demoSee staffing pricing

Built for staffing

The three things generic payroll gets wrong

Most payroll systems were built for a fixed workforce. A contingent one needs its own model.

Assignments, not just employees

The assignment is the unit of hire. Work state and workers’ comp class are resolved per assignment when payroll runs, so a worker who moves between clients is taxed and covered correctly.

Margin you can trust on every hour

Bill rate and pay rate are applied separately to regular, overtime, double-time and break-penalty hours, so every invoice line carries the right margin.

Contracts that run the billing

Client contracts hold the rate cards and the temp-to-perm conversion-fee schedule, and the invoice is built from them.

Back office

From approved time to collected cash

  • Staffing invoices built from approved time and the client’s contract
  • Margin reports by client, assignment and worker
  • AR aging, client credit limits and delinquency holds
  • Pay-rate changes as proposals: pass through to the client, absorb, or split, with an audit trail
  • Shift differential rules, with billing set per contract
  • Pay advances recorded and deducted from the next paycheck automatically

Worksite client portal

Your clients approve time without a login

  • Approve timesheets from an emailed link, with no account to set up
  • Acknowledge pay-rate changes that affect their bill
  • Dispute an invoice line instead of the whole invoice

Recruiting & sales

  • Requisitions and a candidate pipeline
  • A careers page with job feeds
  • A rehire pool of past workers
  • A staffing sales pipeline and quote generator
  • Geofenced clock-in for workers in the field

Find the companies that buy staffing

Prospect Radar has a staffing profile that scores companies from public government filings on how likely they are to buy from a staffing agency. It’s licensed on its own, with pricing on request.

Want the details on paper? Download the staffing agencies brief (PDF).

  • Scored prospects from public government data, including Form 5500, OSHA 300A, WARN notices and Form 990
  • A 0–100 fit score that’s the same every time for the same data, rescored daily
  • A PEO-fit profile, and a staffing profile for companies likely to buy from an agency
  • Coverage views and filtered exports, capped by role
  • The national dataset delivered by Stratum as signed data releases
  • Optional AI write-ups on a prospect, with your own AI provider key

The full platform underneath

Payroll, workers’ comp, benefits and compliance come with it

Multi-state payroll and local taxes, workers’ comp, benefits, onboarding and compliance share one set of data with your assignments and invoices, on the same flat annual price.

Payroll & tax

All 50 states, calculated to the cent, on a tax engine we own.

Stratum’s payroll and tax engine is built in-house, with no third-party payroll core to license or wait on. It handles multi-state workers, local taxes and the overtime rules that trip up generic systems.

  • Federal, state and local withholding across all 50 states and D.C.
  • Multi-state workers, reciprocity agreements and local taxes, including Pennsylvania locals, NYC and Ohio
  • Garnishments, ACH payment files, and a general-ledger file for each payroll that imports into QuickBooks Online, Xero and most ledgers
  • Each employee’s pay compared with their own history before the run can be approved

What it catches

Pay that jumps sharply from an employee’s history, missed California meal-break premiums, and overtime rates that leave out a bonus.

Watch the payroll tour
Benefits & COBRA

Enrollment to COBRA, without middleware.

An employee’s election drives the payroll deduction and the carrier enrollment file directly, so nobody re-keys it. COBRA deadlines are calculated from the qualifying event, and notices are generated from the Department of Labor model.

  • Open enrollment and qualifying life events
  • EDI 834 enrollment files straight to your carriers, once your carrier connections are set up
  • COBRA election notices and deadline tracking
  • Carrier invoices reconciled against active elections

What it catches

Elections submitted outside an enrollment window, and carrier bills for people who aren’t enrolled.

Watch the benefits tour
Workers’ compensation

Workers’ comp, wired straight into payroll.

Premium is calculated from actual wages on every payroll, rated in each work state under the policy in force, so the annual audit has far less to surprise anyone with.

  • Class codes by employee and work state, rated from the rate table you load
  • Experience-mod tracking and year-to-date premium by client
  • Injury reports and claims tracked through closure, with OSHA logs built from them
  • Audit-prep worksheets with the payroll detail a carrier auditor asks for

What it catches

Retroactive payroll changes that alter a client’s exposure, flagged for review.

Onboarding & offboarding

From offer letter to final paycheck.

Guided checklists take each new hire and each new client through every required step, and take departures through separation with the right notices for the state.

  • I-9 with optional AI document reading, and E-Verify cases submitted once your company’s own E-Verify enrollment is connected
  • State-specific separation notices for the 28 states that require one, and final pay prepared from live data
  • Rehires matched to their earlier employment records
  • Import tools for ADP, Paychex, Gusto, Workday, Rippling, QuickBooks and BambooHR

What it catches

I-9 reverification coming due, scheduled before an employee’s work authorization expires.

Watch the onboarding tour
Leave & compliance

Leave plans checked against state law before anyone is affected.

Every client leave plan is tested against state minimums when it’s saved, so a misconfiguration is caught at setup, not in an audit. FMLA, paid family, parental and military leave go to a review queue, because the system knows what it can decide and what a person must.

  • Accrual, carryover, payout and eligibility rules validated against state minimums
  • California’s unlimited-PTO pitfall detected automatically
  • Employee requests and balances, with manager approval
  • EEO-1, WARN Act, state new-hire report files, ACA forms and W-2s

What it catches

Sick-leave plans below a state’s minimum, flagged when the plan is saved.

Watch the time-off tour
Service desk & CRM

Client service and sales in the same system as the payroll.

Client cases, deadlines and the sales pipeline are part of the platform, not a separate product. A won deal becomes a client setup without retyping the census.

  • Cases across HR, benefits, payroll and compliance, with deadline tracking and escalation
  • Duplicate cases detected and merged
  • Sales pipeline with census-based quoting
  • Inbound calls logged to the case record

What it catches

Cases that miss their deadline, flagged every hour and escalated under your own rules.

Watch the presales tour
AI assistance

AI that does the busywork, and asks before it acts.

AI is part of the core platform, not a marketplace add-on, and it is optional: it stays off until you add a key for an AI model provider. Employees get answers about pay, time off and benefits from your own policies, and any action the assistant takes needs their confirmation first.

  • Employee assistant on the web and the mobile app
  • Case triage and drafted replies for your service team
  • I-9 documents read and checked for you, with a switch to keep I-9 images off the AI and enter them by hand
  • Connect your own AI tools to your data with read-only, revocable access

What it catches

Any action the assistant proposes, held until the employee confirms it.

Reporting

Your data, in the shape you need it.

A report builder covers payroll, HR, benefits and service data, with scheduled delivery and client self-service access to their own reports.

  • Custom reports and dashboards without writing queries
  • Sensitive personal data kept out of exports by default
  • Scheduled delivery to the right people
  • Clients see their own data, and only their own

What it catches

Scheduled reports going to someone whose access was removed after the schedule was set.

Security

Your environment, open to your own security review.

Stratum runs on your infrastructure, so your security team can review the system itself rather than a vendor’s attestation. Client data goes only to the outside services you connect: your bank, benefit carriers, tax-filing provider, E-Verify, and mail, email and text-message services. AI features are optional; once you turn them on, the text or document each one works on, including an I-9 document image, is sent to the AI model provider you set up. Stratum itself receives a once-a-day license check-in: an anonymous install fingerprint, the number of companies set up and the license status, never client or employee data. It is on by default and can be switched off in your configuration. Error reports reach Stratum only if you turn them on, with emails, Social Security numbers and account numbers stripped out first.

  • Each client’s data separated at the database level
  • Sensitive personal data encrypted at rest
  • Multi-factor sign-in required for privileged staff, and single sign-on
  • Every change to data recorded in a permanent audit log

What it catches

Queries that skip a client boundary, which return nothing rather than another client’s data.

Connects to the systems you already run

Connectors for the HR, hiring, time, chat and accounting tools below, single sign-on with your identity provider, and import tools for seven common payroll and HR systems, so switching doesn’t mean starting from a blank slate. New hires arrive from your hiring system as they happen; time, BambooHR and QuickBooks syncs run when you choose. Because Stratum runs in your environment, it can also be integrated with your own internal systems.

Greenhouse
Lever
Deputy
Clockify
Slack
Microsoft Teams
QuickBooks Online
BambooHR

How it works

From first look to live, without betting the business

You see your own payroll and invoices run on Stratum, to the cent, before you commit to anything.

  1. 01

    See it configured for your business

    A live environment set up for your business and your size. The product, not slides, and every early conversation is with the founder.

    Or start with a short tour
    • A walkthrough built around how you operate today
    • Your own rate cards, a sample assignment and the invoice it produces
    • Pricing, implementation and founding-partner terms, in the same conversation
  2. 02

    Pilot in parallel, on your own payrolls

    Run Stratum alongside your current system on real payrolls and real invoices. Nothing changes for your workers or clients until you decide to switch, and nothing is billed during the pilot.

    • Every tax on every paycheck compared with your current provider, to the cent
    • You keep the comparison report, whatever you decide
    • The subscription starts only when you choose to make Stratum your platform
  3. 03

    Implement with the people who built it

    Implementation is a one-time fee, scoped and priced before you commit. The range depends mostly on how much data we migrate.

    • Data migration, with import tools for ADP, Paychex, Gusto, Workday, Rippling, QuickBooks and BambooHR
    • Mid-year switches with year-to-date history carried forward
    • Configuration to your workflows, and white-labeling with your name, logo and colors
    • Your book checked against our local-tax coverage before the subscription starts

    Implementation fee

    Staffing$20,000–$40,000
  4. 04

    Go live with a warranty behind you

    Break-fixes are covered for 90 days from go-live sign-off. After that, customization and enhancements are billed by the hour, on your schedule.

    • Federal and state tax table and compliance updates stay included in the subscription
    • Customization and support at $225 an hour after the warranty
    • A flat annual price that changes only at renewal, never with a single new hire
  5. 05

    Run it your way

    Either way, Stratum runs on infrastructure you own and holds only your data.

    Compare the two options on pricing
    • Self-operated: your team runs it on your own servers or cloud account and applies our releases, for the license price
    • Stratum-operated: it runs in your own cloud account and we apply tax, security and version updates, for the license plus an operations fee
    • Your own security team can review the system itself, not a vendor’s attestation

Proof

How we prove it

The claims on this page are backed by a standing test program, documented in our quality and reliability brief, available on request.

Tested to the cent

Every state’s withholding is pinned by exact-value tests against published tables. A tax update that changes a result can’t ship unnoticed.

Checked against real wage data

The tax engine’s coverage has been checked against hundreds of thousands of public wage records from employers across every state.

Client separation, tested continuously

Automated tests confirm that one client can never see another client’s data.

Recovery rehearsed

A full restore from backup is rehearsed against a populated database, with a measured recovery time.

The best proof is your own payroll

Run Stratum alongside your current provider and compare every tax on every paycheck to the cent. You keep the comparison report either way.

Ask about a parallel run

Common questions

How is workers’ comp handled when a worker moves between clients?+
The work state and workers’ comp class come from the assignment, not just the employee record, and are resolved when payroll runs.
Can our clients approve timesheets without an account?+
Yes. Worksite clients get an emailed link to approve timesheets, acknowledge pay-rate changes that affect their bill, and dispute individual invoice lines.
What happens to the bill when a worker gets a raise?+
A pay-rate change becomes a proposal: pass it through to the client, absorb it, or split it. Whichever you choose is recorded with an audit trail, and the client can acknowledge it from their link.
Do you handle temp-to-perm conversion fees?+
Yes. Each client contract can carry its own conversion-fee schedule alongside its rate cards.
How are shift differentials billed?+
Differential rules live with time tracking, and whether a differential is billed to the client is set contract by contract.
How is staffing priced?+
By the number of workers paid over the trailing 12 months, on a flat annual price starting at $12,000 a year — $1,000 a month. See the staffing price list.

See your margin on a real invoice

We’ll walk you through an assignment from timesheet to invoice, configured with your own rate cards.

Request a demoStaffing pricing