A recruiting agency should build a short-term collections forecast from issued, open client invoices—not from placement pipeline value alone. Keep retained-search milestones, contingent placement triggers, candidate start dates, guarantees, and split-fee obligations linked to the invoice, but assign cash timing only from current client-side evidence.

Recruiting contracts can differ across permanent placements, temporary work, and other service models. The Recruitment & Employment Confederation's contract resources reflect that variation. Intuit's A/R aging guidance provides the transaction-level open-balance starting point. The agency forecast should connect these sources without assuming one commercial trigger applies to every engagement.

Split the workflow into three populations

  1. **Placement and service pipeline:** searches, introductions, offers, starts, extensions, or other upstream commercial events.
  2. **Billing-ready work:** a contract-defined milestone has occurred but an invoice is not yet posted.
  3. **Open receivables:** issued invoices with a verified remaining balance in the authorized accounting source.

Only the third population belongs in the invoice-level collections total. The first two still matter to broader cash planning, but labeling them separately prevents the same fee from appearing once as expected billing and again as open AR.

Build one evidence row per open invoice

Preserve the client, invoice number, open amount, invoice date, due date, and accounting status. Then add:

  • Engagement or placement reference without unnecessary candidate personal data
  • Contract-defined billing trigger and observed completion evidence
  • Client purchase-order, portal, approval, or acceptance status when applicable
  • Guarantee, rebate, replacement, dispute, or split-fee condition requiring review
  • Latest payment evidence or promise
  • Internal owner, next action, review date, expected week, and confidence label

The executive recruiting invoice guide goes deeper on individual placement evidence. The recruiting guarantee guide keeps commercial contingencies visible without silently netting the ledger balance.

Use the forecast to order decisions

Start with the invoices that can materially change the four-week cash view and have a named exception. A recent, specific payment commitment may support a week. A pending vendor setup, rejected portal submission, missing purchase order, unresolved guarantee review, or stale client evidence may require a conditional or unconfirmed state.

Do not rank invoices by age alone. Consider amount, concentration, evidence recency, blocker, and whether an internal action can change the outcome. If one client dominates the range, use the customer-concentration framework rather than hiding the exposure inside an agency-wide total.

Reconcile weekly

Freeze the current invoice population and timing assumptions. At the next review, classify each row as collected in week, collected earlier, collected later, still open, corrected, or credited. Preserve the reason a date moved. Repeated misses may justify a lower confidence label or a different evidence requirement, but they do not prove a durable customer payment pattern.

Decision rule

Use issued open invoices as the collections population, retain recruiting-specific contract and placement evidence beside each row, and keep future billing triggers outside the AR total until an invoice posts. Forecast cash from current evidence, then reconcile every assumption to observed receipts.

AR Pulse analyzes an authorized QuickBooks receivables export and returns a ranked cash-action list plus a four-week collections range. It does not interpret recruiting contracts, contact clients, or promise a payment outcome. Recruiting finance teams can apply for AR Pulse.