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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
Staffing agencies, manpower suppliers and flexi-staffing firms
A staffing firm is the legal employer of people it rarely sees, deployed to clients whose attendance rules, shifts and holidays are not its own.
A staffing firm's associates appear on its payroll and work on its clients' premises. The client decides the shift, the weekly off and the holiday list. The staffing firm pays the wage, deducts and deposits PF and ESI, issues the payslip and carries the statutory liability.
That split is the whole difficulty. Attendance arrives from dozens of client sites in different formats, each client has its own rules, and the firm's margin depends on paying exactly what was earned and billing for it. Payroll for staffing companies is less one payroll than many small ones, each following a client's rules and all filed under the firm's registrations.
A new client contract adds a few hundred associates at sites in another state.
A client asks for proof that PF and ESI were deposited for the associates on its premises.
Attendance sheets from client sites arrive after the payroll cut-off every month.
Not a feature gap, the specific operational pressures this kind of company runs into, and why each one resists a spreadsheet.
Shift timings, weekly offs, holiday lists and overtime rules differ by client and often by client site. Treating the client site as a location with its own configuration is what lets one payroll respect them all.
Client supervisors sign off attendance on their schedule, not yours. Capturing it at the site, through mobile check-in with a geofence around the client's premises, removes the wait for a sheet.
PF, ESI, Professional Tax and LWF for deployed associates are deducted and deposited by the staffing firm as employer. An error is the firm's error, multiplied across every associate it affects.
Associates move between clients, finish assignments and join new ones. Each move is a dated change, and continuity of service has to survive it, because gratuity and leave are computed from it.
You do not have to switch everything on at once, and for a company like yours there is a sensible order. This is it, with the reasoning attached.
The cleanest way to run deployed staff is to treat each client site as a location on the employee record, with its own shift patterns, weekly offs, holiday list and geofence. An associate deployed there inherits that configuration; moved elsewhere, they inherit the new one from the date of the move.
This keeps two things true at once. The associate's attendance is measured against the rules of the place they actually work. And the firm still has one employee record, one payroll run and one set of statutory returns for everyone it employs.
Because the location is also what decides state-wise Professional Tax and LWF, a deployment to a client in another state changes those deductions correctly without anyone remembering to.
An associate who finishes one assignment and starts another the following week has not left the firm. Recording the move as a new joining, as is common when each client is run on a separate sheet, resets their service.
Continuity matters concretely. Gratuity eligibility under the Payment of Gratuity Act 1972, s.4, is based on continuous service, and leave accrual is computed from the date of joining. A redeployment should be a dated change on the existing record.
Where an assignment ends and the associate leaves, the exit should be recorded with its date and the full-and-final settlement assembled from the ledger, so that a later rehire starts from an accurate history.
Where a staffing firm supplies workers to a client's establishment, the arrangement commonly falls within the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970, under which the contractor may need a licence and the client, as principal employer, has its own registration and responsibilities. State rules made under the Act set much of the detail.
The labour codes, in force since 21 November 2025, revise parts of this framework. Licensing thresholds and obligations should be checked against the current notified position for each state before being relied on.
The administrative consequence is that the firm must be able to show, per client, that associates were paid and statutory dues deposited. A payroll that can report by client site produces that evidence without anyone rebuilding it from bank statements.
The firm's clients keep setting the rules for their own floors. What the platform holds is each of those rule sets against the right associates, so the firm can pay and file for everyone from one record and report by client when asked.
Yes. Shift patterns, grace periods, weekly offs and holiday calendars are configured per location, and a client site can be a location. Associates follow the configuration of the site they are deployed to.
Through mobile check-in with a GPS geofence configured around the client's premises, with location tagging and optional selfie validation. Where a client site has its own biometric device, supported devices can also sync attendance.
Ordinarily the staffing firm, as their employer. The deductions are derived from each associate's salary structure and the returns are produced from the same run, so the totals tie back to what was filed.
It continues, because the move is a dated change on the existing record rather than a new record. Gratuity eligibility and leave accrual both depend on that continuity.
Reporting reads the live record by location, department and grade, so cost can be reported by client site where each site is configured as a location. Payroll is not an invoicing system, but it provides the figures billing depends on.
Possibly, depending on the arrangement, the number of workers and the state. That is a legal question for your advisers; check the current notified position, including under the labour codes, for each state you supply into.
Looking for a custom walkthrough or have specific statutory policy requirements? Connect with our product specialists in Pune for a 1-on-1 consultation.
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