Weekly and Monthly Contractor Billing. Building a Clear Process

Contractor billing looks simple from the outside. Hours are approved, multiplied by a rate and invoiced. In practice, the cycle you choose, how you handle the edges of each period and who does what on billing day decide whether invoices go out cleanly or generate a week of queries.

This article covers how to choose between weekly and monthly contractor billing, how to run both side by side, and how to make each billing run repeatable.

Weekly billing suits placements where clients expect frequent invoices, where contractors are paid weekly and you want cash to come in on a similar rhythm, or where hours vary a lot from week to week. Each invoice is smaller and problems surface quickly, but there are more invoices to prepare and more approvals to chase.

Monthly billing suits longer placements with steady hours and clients who prefer one invoice per month, often aligned with their own month end. There is less administration per contractor, but a single missing timesheet can delay a larger sum, and errors can go unnoticed for longer.

Many agencies end up with both. The important thing is that the billing schedule is recorded per placement and agreed with the client at the start, not decided invoice by invoice.

Billing is easiest when the timesheet period and the billing period match. A weekly placement with weekly timesheets bills each approved week. A monthly placement with monthly timesheets bills each approved month. Problems start when a monthly invoice has to be built from weekly timesheets that straddle the month end.

If you can, set the timesheet period to match the billing schedule for each placement. JN Tempo already lets you set weekly or monthly timesheet periods per placement, which removes most of the splitting work before billing even starts.

Write down, per client if necessary, exactly what goes into an invoice. It sounds obvious, but different people preparing invoices will make different assumptions unless the rules are written down.

A billing run should follow the same steps every time, ideally in a written checklist so that anyone on the team can carry it out. A typical run looks something like the sequence below.

Late approvals and corrections are inevitable. What matters is having a rule. If a timesheet is approved after the billing run, decide whether it goes on a supplementary invoice or rolls into the next period, and apply the same rule every time.

If an already billed timesheet needs correcting, avoid quietly editing the original. Raise a credit or adjustment so the client's records and yours stay aligned, and keep a note of why the change was made. An approval history that shows what changed and who approved it makes these conversations much shorter.

Billing does not end when the invoice is sent. Track when each invoice is due and follow up consistently. A short, polite reminder shortly before or on the due date is usually more effective than a firm one weeks later.

It also helps to know which clients habitually pay late, so you can raise it at the next contract review rather than chasing every month.

Contractor billing is part of the JN Tempo V2.0.0 rollout and is not yet listed on the live product site. As planned, it supports weekly and monthly billing schedules, payment due reminders, approved hours with approver details, rates, currencies and totals, and optional PO references. Validated Xero compatible billing export files are also being rolled out.

Today, JN Tempo already handles the steps that feed billing, including weekly and monthly timesheets, a single approval queue per manager, expenses, filters with totals kept separate by currency, and CSV, Excel and PDF exports. You can try it with a 14 day free trial at jntempo.jnhorizon.com.