Many staffing companies also do PEO (Professional Employment), and many PEOs migrate into staffing. So it’s no surprise that PEO software consists of a mutant subset of staffing software features.
PEO software generates invoices for clients, much like staffing software. It differs however in that the billing or uplift is determined with a cost-plus model – usually a percentage or amount on top of costs like payroll and insurance. Some staffing software packages (like, let me think, oh yes – TempWorks) accommodate this cost-plus billing as a standard extension of its billing engine.
PEOs often deal with a more stable workforce than staffing companies, and thus their needs for punching time and adjustments differ from that of a temporary workforce. The features required have more common to HRMS/payroll systems than staffing software. User interfaces for HRMS payroll tend to use the term “position” and “requisition” as compared to “assignment” and “job order” in staffing.
Some PEOs however service clients with highly flexible workforces – in fact much of the growth in PEO reflects the ongoing economic trend of fluid labor. A PEO for example might outsource the entire workforce of a temporary assembly line whose hours get automatically transmitted via time-clocks for payroll and invoice processing. Even professional workers are increasingly working on a contract or ‘temp’ basis, and so PEOs find themselves needing staffing software features for them as well.
The trend therefore is for the PEO and staffing business processes to become more alike, and so their respective software will become more alike as well. The most adaptive software packages will make it easy for end-users to support both business processes.
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You should integrate Disqus or Oauth for comments logins.
Anyway, good post, and agree that software should be flexible enough to handle any of these situations fluidly. Having participated in my fair share of HRIS roll-outs, it is clear most enterprise technology is stuck in static data models and process lock-in thus leading to confusing and irrelevant UI’s. To date, I have yet to see anything that is truly flexible, even the likes of Workday exhibit limitations.
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hi Mark…i’d be curious to know more about how Workday is doing…seems they came in with big fanfare a few years back and took some Oracle accounts…but not much since.
I’ll check out oauth but as far as Disqus goes, i’ve been to sites that used their service and often found the comment management slow or buggy. Are they more stable now? What would the advantages be?
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