🙋‍♀️Who can use it?

Zipwire is suits any situation with a worker, their boss and someone who processes a timesheet, usually with a view to paying the worker.

Our app can be used by a range of businesses and individual users across industries, from technology recruitment to outdoor activity centres. See examples in the next section.

Staffing Agencies & Recruiters

Recruiters and temp agencies will get great value from Zipwire. Our product is designed for the complex relationship between agency, flexible worker and end client.

The staffing agency can create their Zipwire workplace and configure its branding so that senders and approvers are all reminded of the services provided by the agency.

Senders can be configured with the rate they are paid and the rate they are charged to the client at. The billing plan allows the agency to customise the minimum billable unit of time, such as hours or half-days, and the maximum for each day, and even set weekend and overtime rates.

Where the workers are freelancers with their own companies, you can configure Zipwire to automatically create an invoice from their company and attach it to the timesheet. You can also setup client invoicing in various currencies.

Senders track time in their private journal and Zipwire fills in the timesheet according to the rules and computes pay and charge totals. Rate changes can be scheduled ahead of time.

Your senders can update their journal by sending a description of their work to Zipwire via WhatsApp. Approvers receive WhatsApp notification of timesheets to act on, and can approve or reject via a quick message.

People Ops & HR

Companies that directly hire freelancers or run a group of temps, can create their Zipwire workplace as per usual, but configure the client as either themselves, or as subsidiaries, departments, cost-centers or the work-sites they operate.

Zipwire is free for small groups of senders, under 10 people at the time of writing.

Typically, when setting up timesheet senders, the pay and charge rates are kept the same and the client invoicing features are ignored. However, each business is different and sometimes companies cross-charge and may even add a service charge to the cost-center for the services the department provide.

Founders & Small Businesses

If you run a company and hire freelancers directly, then you can set your Zipwire workplace up and add the timesheet senders, then set yourself as the approver.

Zipwire is free for small groups of senders, under 10 people at the time of writing.

In this scenario, you configure your own company as the client and skip any settings regarding charging and client invoicing.

When setting rates for your workers, simply set both the pay and charge rate to the same amount as you'll unlikely be charging yourself for their services.

Zipwire's back office processing workflow includes stages for progressing timesheets through payment, charging the client, chasing late payments, etc. These steps probably aren't needed and can be clicked through. A future update will allow you to exclude some steps. Larger businesses sometimes cross-charge departments. In this situation, Zipwire can be used as if the department supplying the resource is a staffing agency and the client is the other department. See above.

Lone Freelancers & Gig Workers

If you are freelancer and are working directly with a client, then you can use login to Zipwire and begin recording time in your journal. When you create a timesheet, you'll be given the opportunity to invite your approver and an optional processor, who might be someone in HR at your client.

This is useful when you have been hired through word of mouth, rather than via a recruiter, and you need a simple timesheet approval system.

Alternatively, you can ask your client's HR team to create a new Zipwire workplace and set you up as the sole timesheet sender, your line manager as the approver and themselves as the processor.

For just you, this will not cost them anything and they will not have to enter credit card details.

Accounts Payable

At the moment, this group cannot yet login to Zipwire to review their charges. But we're working on it.

Staffing agencies and talent-hunting teams use Zipwire to manage the contract staff that they place with their clients. Zipwire can produce totals and generate PDF invoices to help an agency charge their client for the services rendered, but at present the client cannot login and view anything.

Allowing the client to directly view their timesheets and charges is on our feature roadmap.

Example industries

The following give some ideas as to how Zipwire can help operate two very different types of business, with regard to their flexible, time-based staffing.

IT Recruitment

Recruitment is the classic use-case for Zipwire. In this scenario, there is the recruitment agency, their client and the freelancer.

The agency finds or has a pool of talented people it can place with their client and they charge a unit rate for these services, based on the time they devote to their client. Of course, the freelancer needs compensating and this is typically a slightly lower rate than the agency is charging for their services.

In this case, the agency would create their Zipwire workplace and add the sender, and the approver, who is usually the sender's line manager, and one or more people within the agency's back office team to process the timesheets.

Invitations are sent out to all the people involved with special links which connect the recipient to their new Zipwire assignment.

When the all invoicing features are configured, Zipwire will produce an invoice from the freelancer's company that accompanies their timesheet, automatically. It will also expose actions for creating invoices to charge the client for the slightly increased amount. All data feeds into Zipwire's data warehouse for search and reporting.

Care Homes

Nursing homes and assisted living accommodation rely on flexible staff from specialist agencies. Zipwire is perfect for this situation.

The arrangement is similar to IT recruitment above, except that nursing staff may not operate as a small company, which is common for IT and software engineers.

The agency creates their Zipwire workplace and first assignment and client. The assignment is used to group senders into a team and their line manager(s) and the client represents the care home or trust.

Sender invoicing can be disabled if the workers are not expected to be invoicing the agency. However, the agency can use Zipwire to quickly produce accurate invoices to send to their care home client.

Note that Zipwire does not have features to track the time when people started work and when they ended or took breaks. However, the activities feature has been designed to represent clients, client sites and shifts.

Outdoor Activity Franchise

In this example, Zzzzzzaaargh Activities Inc. operates long zip wires in cool places around the countryside of the United States. They run these franchises with a flexible set of often students who work a few days a week and may be away for long periods during school time.

In this situation, the central franchise operator in head office supplies some useful services to their franchisees. They can setup a single Zipwire workplace and configure their clients as their various franchises around the country.

They can create an assignment per franchise client and add the flexible workers on an hourly billing plan. They can set a different pay rate and charge rate in order to cover the cost of managing payroll on behalf of their franchisees. The approvers could be senior people within each franchise.

Since Zipwire allows many assignment per client, they can have one assignment for the junior team members and another assignment for the senior people.

This company would likely disable the sender invoicing, but enable the client invoicing so that they can invoice all the franchise companies for the people ops services provided.

The Freelance Coder

Francis, a freelance software engineer is doing some work for a few months for a mutual friend Anika's new company. She wants to track the amount of time she works on it each day and bill for her time each week.

She can use Zipwire as a lone sender of timesheets for free.

All she needs to do is login and start recording her time in her private journal then, when she's ready to get paid, she can create her timesheet and at that point Zipwire will provide an opportunity to create a new workflow.

This workflow must have an approver and can have an optional processor. She adds the email addresses of these people, who may be Anika to approve and someone who works for Anika doing the processing. Invitations will be sent out to these people to join Zipwire.

In this situation, there is no Zipwire workplace and Francis has effectively assigned herself her own workflow.

Note that Francis can begin to work with another customer and continue using Zipwire by simply logging time against a new activity. The new activity will need linking to a workflow and she can create a whole new one with a different approver and processor.

She can also ask the new customer if they'd consider setting up their workplace on Zipwire and creating an assignment with her as a sender. She can then link her new activity to the workflow assigned by her new customer.

As you can see, senders can use Zipwire with more than one customer or agency.