🏅How Zipwire Approve is radically different and speeds up pay day

Designed to solve the endless pain of pay day for workers, their boss and the awesome people who toil away behind the scenes processing everything.

Getting everyone paid each month can feel like endless busywork.

For freelancers, filling out timesheet and preparing an invoice is a pain. They often forget, or leave off the invoice, or it's wrong for all manner of reasons. Many timesheet portals are very poorly made and don't work on mobile or modern browsers, or they have to create and send an Office document, and they'll simply put it off until next time.

It's also a pain for their boss who has to go in and approve dozens of timesheets, or be contacted on a weekend because of a late submission. They suffer similar problems to the freelancer if the system is clunky or file based.

Then there’s the busy folks at the receiving end who are flicking between Excel and Outlook, chasing people up, double checking invoices and rates, looking for bank holidays on top of preparing invoices for their clients and pulling down a line of credit.

It’s a lot of work, and once done, it starts all over again in a couple of weeks.

Designed to target key pain areas

Zipwire sits at the heart of your staffing agency and has been thoughtfully designed to radically reduce this burden.

Explaining how Zipwire's features help, let's dive in to the story of payday.

Worker pain

It's Friday evening and Mrs Worker is at her desk. Now, being Friday evening, either something will go massively wrong and keep her late, or someone is leaving and people are dragging them to a party, or the highway is closed and they've got to beat the traffic.

The last thing Mrs Worker wants to do is a timesheet. So she either skips it and waits for next time and lives off money in the bank, or she smashes the thing out in a rush, forgetting Monday was a public holiday, and that she had a rate change and so now the invoice is wrong.

Oh, and she did a 12 hour day a fortnight ago and slept in to make up for it the next time, but her current timesheet system, which uses bizarre decimal work days, goes wonky when she puts 1.5 in. She's also had a Post-it note on her screen for weeks to remind her that she'd left early for her son's sports day at the start of the month.

Worker pain killers

Well, the first thing is to allow her to track time away from the official timesheet, so she can track what really happened, in detail.

Actually, the first thing is to remove any username and passwords so she doesn't forget and can just come in via her Google or LinkedIn account.

The next thing is to make this fast and easy to do by designing a rapid UI which let's her copy what she did from the week before, and copy it down the current week.

Then, make it even easier by letting her speak a journal update from her phone, via WhatsApp, which understands her short description of her week using AI.

And as she's a techie, she can also update her journal from the place where she spends most of her time: her beloved command line terminal. Nice.

Finally, when she wants to submit her timesheet, Zipwire automatically fills it out according to the rules of her engagement, so it cannot be wrong. We'll warn her if she's put time down on a bank holiday, too.

Oh and let's go ahead and automatically create her invoice while we're at it.

Approver pain

Many line managers around the world will get an email with a Word document inside. And they have to open it, which is fine when they're at the "big computer" but maybe they're on the ward, or up some scaffolding, or on the sofa.

They reply "approved" over and over before remembering Monday was a public holiday and they just approved some mistakes. Ugh.

But the Mr Bossman in this story is lucky because this agency is using the amazing timesheet portal they had made 15 years ago. It doesn't work on his mobile, and the device in his study doesn't have his password saved. Annoying.

Oh but what if Mr Bossman is not on the sofa, but on a sun lounger in Bali and their phone is OFF? How will everyone get paid now?!

Approver pain killers

As with the timesheet senders, let's allow Mr Bossman to login using his Microsoft account or whatever, and then send him the timesheet over WhatsApp. Ooh.

He can just reply "approve" or "reject" before his other half yells at him for working on holiday.

The second important design choice is to send the timesheets into a team inbox which not only he can see, but also his deputy can see. So his deputy approves everything and saves everyone's mortgage from defaulting and a cashflow headache at the agency!

Three cheers for the deputy (and for Zipwire's designers).

Processor pain

If you're using emailed Word documents and various attached invoices, then I don't even know where to begin? How do you even?? Do you just throw people at the problem?

But even if you have a clunky timesheet portal with its decimal work days, you've still got so much to reconcile and prepare for pay day.

And you've most likely got to borrow the cash to pay everyone and produce accurate invoices for all your clients. Then handle contractor queries, forgotten passwords, adjust for mistakes or issue credit notes, and enter it all in your accounts package.

Let me guess. You make the commute to the office because you have two big screens and you need all that space for all the Excel workbooks, your accounts website, millions of Outlook attachments, a folder full of Word docs, or perhaps a few browser tabs open on your timesheet portal - which keeps logging you out.

You've got to search for stuff, check invoices, figure out who hasn't submitted, chase line managers, check rates and remember rate changes.

For all your timesheet wranglers out there, we feel your pain.

Processor pain killers

Many of these pains are mitigated by the features we've designed for timesheet senders and their approvers Timesheets land in team inboxes, and you can divide and conquer by splitting the processing teams up.

The timesheets are much less likely to be wrong because Zipwire has filled it out in accordance with the rules, and where you have freelancers that invoice you, they're attached and accurate and even include the rate change that happened halfway through the month!

Zipwire gives you a series of stages to move the timesheets through so you know where they're all at, feel a sense of control, and there are tags and filters to help you organise them all.

What's more, in the click of a button Zipwire can create you an invoice for one or all the timesheets for your client, including payment details, tax and cross currencies.

More to come

To be honest, there's so much busywork in managing temp workers that we're still thinking up ways that Zipwire can help, such as putting a little highlight on the timesheets worth looking at - those with unusual times.

In fact we have an idea for automating almost all of it, including the invoice factoring and payouts.

It was a long read but we hope you get an idea of how Zipwire has been designed to radically reduce the costly busywork.