Time Tracking for Recruiters & Staffing Agencies
Recruiters and staffing agencies work across sourcing, screening, interviewing, and account management - but when hours go unlogged across back-to-back calls and parallel searches, retained clients get undercharged, contingency work looks unprofitable, and pricing future mandates is guesswork. Sandtime.io lets your team log time per client and role from any device, tracks retained search hours against contracted amounts in real time, and gives you clean billing data before the invoice goes out.
Recruiters & Staffing Agencies: why they choose Sandtime.io
Track time by client and role
Assign every hour to the right client and role - sourcing, screening, interviewing, onboarding, and account management - as you work. Know exactly what each placement and retainer is costing before the invoice goes out.
Monitor retainer and contract hours
See how many hours each retained search has consumed. Know when you are approaching or exceeding retained hours before it becomes a client conversation, and use real data to price future retainers accurately.
Know which placements are profitable
Know the real labor cost behind each placement. Find which clients and role types generate the most work relative to fee, and use that data to focus on the work that is actually profitable.
One account for the whole team
Track hours across recruiters, researchers, and coordinators from one shared account. No chasing individual timesheets at the end of a search or billing period.
How a recruiting team tracks every search against its retainer
A recruiting or staffing team sets up Sandtime.io with one project per client search and a free account for every recruiter, researcher and coordinator. Sourcing, screening and interview time is logged against the search as it happens, so retained hours and the labor cost of each placement are known before the invoice goes out.
- Open a project for each searchName it after the client and the role, such as a client and its Senior Accountant search. Mark retained work billable, and keep business development on its own non-billable project so it never reaches a client summary.
- Invite the whole deskInvite recruiters, researchers and coordinators by email, and they sign in with email, Google, Microsoft or Apple. Make each account lead a Project Administrator on their searches, so they can assign people and see the time reported there.
- Log time between candidate callsStart a timer when a sourcing block begins, or add a screening call afterwards with its start and end time and a short note. The Chrome extension and the phone apps keep the timer one click away between back-to-back candidate calls.
- Check retained hours before billingSet a cost rate per recruiter and a revenue rate per search. A report grouped by project and member shows hours and cost per search, and the Invoices template adds net revenue, tax and total revenue per project before you bill.
Step by step in the help center: invite the team with the right role, approve a week from the email, and turn on auto-locking.
Common use cases
- Log sourcing, screening, and interview hours per client and role
- Monitor retained search hours against contracted amounts in real time
- Track contingency and retained work separately per client
- Pull client billing summaries without reconstructing the search
- Keep recruiter, researcher, and coordinator time in one account
- Export time data by project and date range for profitability reviews
Key features
One-click timers
Start timing when a task begins and stop it when you move on. One click logs to the right client and role without breaking your focus.
Retroactive time entry
Add sourcing sessions, calls, or interviews after the fact with a note. Nothing is lost because you were in back-to-back candidate calls.
Multiple searches at once
Run separate timers for multiple active searches simultaneously. Each client tracks independently so hours never cross between mandates.
Export and report
Pull time reports by client, recruiter, or date range. Export to CSV for billing, retainer reviews, or profitability analysis.
Where Sandtime.io stops
Better to know before you invite the team. These are the gaps people in this line of work ask about most.
- No invoicingSandtime.io does not send invoices. The Invoices report template lists time, rate, net revenue, tax, and total per project, and you export it to Excel or CSV for your billing software.
- No project budgetsThere is no budget field or budget alert. A report grouped by project shows hours, cost, and revenue so far, and you compare them with the estimate yourself.
- Reminders are a weekly emailThe fill-timesheet reminder is one email, sent on Friday at 6 PM while auto-locking is on. It is off by default, so each member switches it on in their notification settings.
Keep exploring
Continue with the most relevant Sandtime.io pages for this topic.
Track breaks and other non-billable time
Sandtime.io has no dedicated break timer. Non-billable projects with the Billable switch off keep breaks in your timesheet and out of what you bill.
Open pageBillable Hours
Work hours that can be charged to a client or project. Essential for professional services firms to track revenue.
Open pageCost, revenue, and billable reporting
Use billable flags and rates to understand project profitability without losing the self-reported workflow.
Open pageCost
The expense associated with employee work hours. Calculated by multiplying time by cost rates for profitability analysis.
Open pageCreate a project for reported time
Create projects that people can report against, mark them billable or non-billable, and keep reporting tidy.
Open pageCustom Reports
User-defined reports with flexible groupings, metrics, and filters. Custom reports answer specific business questions.
Open pageTrack your first hour today
Create your free account and see results in minutes.