What happens today
Every line has to clear before the invoice run.
Contractor hours arrive weekly in whatever format the client site uses. A portal export, a signed PDF, a spreadsheet, a photograph of a paper sheet, or an entry in the agency timesheet app. Before the invoice run, someone has to establish for every line whether the hours match the contracted pattern, whether the rate applied is the rate on the placement rate card including overtime, shift, and holiday variants, whether the assignment still has purchase order budget remaining, whether the required approval is present and came from a person authorized to give it, and whether the client rules on rounding, breaks, travel, and expenses have been applied.
It is judgment at volume, under deadline.
None of these is a single lookup. Each line is a small reconciliation — hours against the contracted pattern, rate against the placement card, burn against the purchase order, approval against who was authorized to give it — and the answer to one can change the next. That work repeats across hundreds or thousands of lines in the days before the invoice run, done by people who have other work that week, which is exactly when a tired eye lets a wrong rate or an unapproved hour through.
The errors surface later, not at invoicing.
The errors do not disappear when the invoice goes out. They surface later as a credit note, an hour written off because it was never billed, a payroll correction, or a client query that takes an account manager a week to answer because the evidence is spread across an email thread, a client portal, and the finance system.
Every miss is margin, and it hides one line at a time.
An hour that is never billed is revenue the placement earned and the agency will not recognize, and a premium rate applied where it should not be is a credit the client will eventually claw back. Because each one is a single line inside a run of thousands, it does not announce itself; it shows up cycle after cycle as thinner margin than the placement should carry, until someone spends the time to reconstruct where it went.
How the architecture runs it
Contractor hours arrive in whatever format the client site produces, and every line has to clear the rate card, the purchase order, and the client rules before the invoice run — work done under deadline across thousands of lines. The FLOW reads the hours whatever their format, tests every line against the rules, passes the clean ones straight to billing, and sends only genuine exceptions to the account owner.
the rate card, the purchase-order budget, and each client’s billing rules; owned by the business
every line: the rule it was tested against, the value that failed, who resolved it, and the outcome
What the FLOW does
Trigger on the cut-off.
A submitted timesheet or the weekly payroll cut-off starts the FLOW; Connect pulls the placement records, the rate cards, the live PO balances, and the client billing rules from the systems that hold them.
Normalize the hours.
A Digital Task Agent reads timesheets from portal exports, PDFs, spreadsheets, and photographs down to line level and maps each to its placement, shift pattern, and approved rate.
Test every line.
The FLOW checks the hours against the shift pattern, recalculates base and premium rates, tracks the burn against the PO balance, confirms an authorized sign-off, and applies the client billing rules, tagging each discrepancy with the rule and the value.
Clean straight through, exception to the owner.
Clean lines pass straight to billing. A disputed one goes to the account owner in the Enterprise Workplace with the original timesheet, the line-level extraction, and the failed rule attached.
Write back and update the balance.
Connect writes the approvals and adjustments back to the finance system and recalculates the PO balance, so the next cycle validates against a live ledger rather than a stale number.
What it's worth
Different decision-makers weigh different things.
Here is what this FLOW returns to each.
Written-off hours and credit notes stop leaking margin. The weekly billing run clears without a pre-invoice scramble, and every valid line is billed.
Thousands of lines clear per run with only genuine exceptions surfaced — a predictable weekly close instead of an all-hands reconciliation.
Every billed line is defensible straight from the execution record, so a client invoice query is answered from evidence rather than a week of retrieval.
Runs above your finance system and timesheet app with no migration, and the rules the FLOW applies stay IT-governed.
Client disputes close in minutes — the source timesheet, the line, and the failed rule sit together — so the relationship is not spent on reconciliation.
Coexistence
How this connects to what you already run.
NEWWORK Connect reads from and writes to the systems that hold your records, including applicant tracking, HR, finance, and procurement platforms. Those systems remain your Systems of Record. NEWWORK runs above and between them, which is why a FLOW of this kind can go into production without a migration program standing in front of it.
You can begin with one of these FLOWs, with a Digital Employee owning a single recurring role, with an Enterprise Workplace for one team, or with a complete Business Solution. Any starting point. Any combination. Your way.
Start above your existing systems. Replace selectively when it creates value.
Governed autonomy
Why the record matters as much as the work.
Every FLOW produces one execution record: what happened, in what order, under which policy, by which human or which Digital Task Agent, on what evidence, and with what outcome.
Governed autonomy means the FLOW acts inside limits you set, escalates what it should not decide alone, and leaves a trace of both. The same record answers the compliance request, the invoice dispute, and the audit question, because it is the record of the work itself rather than a report written about it afterwards.
That is what makes work of this kind safe to give to an AI system in a regulated, client-audited business. The capability is what makes the pilot worth running. The record is what makes it defensible.
AI-native by architecture. Agentic in execution. Autonomous where governed.
