More temps, fewer hours. Payroll no longer matches the plant invoice
On 18 August 2026 the Polish HR Forum reported 82,000 people in member agencies in the second quarter, up 1 per cent year on year, against 40,000 FTE, down 2 per cent. For an agency that means more files and shorter bookings, while hours still come back from the hall in a spreadsheet.
On 18 August 2026 Prawo.pl reported the HR services figures for the second quarter published the same day by the Polish HR Forum. Turnover at 32 member groups, 73 companies in total, rose 3 per cent year on year to PLN 1,858 million. Temporary work remains the core: 62.4 per cent of the mix and PLN 1,159 million of turnover, 4 per cent higher than a year earlier.
PFHR agencies employed 82,000 people, 1 per cent more than in the second quarter of 2025. The nationwide estimate is 272,000 temporary workers. Hours converted into full-time equivalents came to 40,000 FTE — 2 per cent down year on year, 1 per cent up on the first quarter.
In an agency office those two numbers add up to one working week: more personnel files for fewer hours per person. The client still pays for hours someone has to confirm. Pay still comes from the time record. When those two accounts live in separate spreadsheets, a temporary-work hours register stops being paperwork and starts deciding the margin.
What the chamber and the jobs market published in August
Member turnover in the second quarter broke down as follows: temporary work 62.4 per cent (PLN 1,159 million), outsourcing 25.1 per cent (PLN 467 million, up 6 per cent year on year), posting of workers 4.6 per cent, recruitment 4.4 per cent, RPO 1.5 per cent, other services 1.9 per cent, career management 0.1 per cent. The estimate for the whole Polish temporary-work market, including firms outside the chamber: PLN 2 billion in that one quarter.
Ewelina Glińska-Kołodziej, a PFHR board member quoted by Prawo.pl, spoke of a mature, stable ecosystem and of businesses meeting the economy with flexible staffing. In the chamber’s agencies 81 per cent of contracts with temporary workers are contracts of employment. Production accounts for 61 per cent, services for 38 per cent.
Permanent recruitment for Polish employers brought members PLN 75 million. That is up 7 per cent year on year and 6 per cent quarter on quarter. Recruitment for foreign employers: PLN 7 million, up 21 per cent year on year. RPO, taking over the recruitment process: PLN 29 million, up 5 per cent year on year. Szymon Rudnicki, PFHR vice-president, linked the jump in domestic recruitment to firms unlocking headcount after a cautious start to the year.
On 25 August Bankier.pl, citing PAP Biznes, reported Grupa Pracuj’s second-quarter results. Revenue: PLN 216.1 million, up 5.7 per cent year on year. On Pracuj.pl the number of recruitment projects rose 5.5 per cent, to 135,000. Chief executive Przemysław Gacek spoke of a pick-up in every key segment, including manual work (blue collars) and services. The average project price on the site rose by nearly 5 per cent year on year.
On 20 August the same site covered GUS wage data for July. Average pay in large enterprises: PLN 9,509.02 gross, up 6.8 per cent year on year. Employment in the enterprise sector: 6,378,900 full-time posts, the first monthly rise since November 2025, still 0.8 per cent below July a year earlier. An agency staffing a shop floor is buying hours in a market where job ads are getting dearer and average pay in the economy is rising faster than a month earlier.
From 1 January 2026 the national minimum wage is PLN 4,806 gross, and the minimum hourly rate for specified civil-law contracts is PLN 31.40 — as Infor.pl recalled on 25 August, citing the Council of Ministers regulation of 11 September 2025 (Journal of Laws 2025, item 1242). An unfilled hour, or hours the client will not confirm, therefore has a hard cost floor. The chamber notes that in its agencies a contract of employment still dominates, not the hourly rate from a mandate contract.
More people, shorter assignments
FTE in the PFHR report is hours converted into full-time posts. A 2 per cent fall while headcount rises 1 per cent need not mean idle halls. It may mean that the same plant and the same warehouse take people for shorter windows: one week, two shifts, cover for sickness, a peak top-up.
In the first quarter of 2026 chamber members had 86,000 temporary workers, 14 per cent more than a year earlier, with FTE up only 1 per cent — that is how PFHR described the start of the year. Glińska-Kołodziej then tied the gap directly to flexibility: more people, not necessarily more full-time equivalents. In the second quarter the headcount is lower than in winter (82,000 against 86,000), but still up year on year, while hours are down.
Each extra person is a file, a referral, medicals, health and safety, a roster and a settlement. Each shorter booking is another hours loop with the plant. An office that used to run a dozen regular people on one hall suddenly counts dozens of cards that start and stop every week. A spreadsheet will hold that until one person still remembers who was supposed to be on the second shift on Monday.
An example: two plants, a warehouse and three files
Imagine an agency that places a few dozen people across two manufacturing plants and one warehouse. This is an example, not a description of a real firm. At that scale you can still manage it by phone, and you can no longer manage it without a mistake.
On Friday the office sets next week’s cover. Names go to the shift leader by email or messenger. On Monday morning two people fail to stand the shift. One wrote at night; the other did not pick up. The warehouse rings for a replacement by ten. Someone from the reserve arrives, but at a different gate from the one on the referral.
On Wednesday a hours sheet arrives from the plant. A different column layout from the week before, because a different supervisor compiled it. Night overtime sits in a comment, not in a cell. Payroll is calculated from a private file, because that is where absences, allowances and the employment-contract rates live. Accounts raise the invoice from a third listing, because the client pays for confirmed hours, not for what went on the payroll.
On Friday it turns out the warehouse will not confirm four hours from Tuesday, and the worker has them on the list. Or the other way round: the plant signs a shift that is not on the referral, because the replacement walked in on a verbal nod. The agency either pays from margin, argues over an addendum, or leaves a hole until the next month.
In that story a single assignment card would have been enough: who was due, who arrived, how many hours the plant confirmed, what went to payroll. Two points in the flow: attendance status on the shift day, and a hours list the client ticks in a portal or in the same panel the office uses to raise the invoice.
Who was supposed to stand the shift
A roster in an agency sets cover for a given shift at a given user undertaking: hall A, second shift, a post on the line, valid medicals. When 61 per cent of temporary work in the chamber sits in production, that roster lives to the hall’s clock, not the office’s.
The jam starts when cover lives in a spreadsheet and arrival is confirmed by phone. The coordinator knows who was sent. They do not know who crossed the gate. A no-show at six in the morning stays a hole until someone at the plant rings. Until then the line either stops or takes a person from another firm.
A shared shift-cover list with a plain status — referred, confirmed, on site, no-show, replacement — shortens that call. It need not be an app with biometric login. It is enough that the coordinator and the shift leader look at the same shift, not at two messenger threads.
If the worker has only their referral on the phone and a button for “I am on site” or “I cannot make it”, the office sees the gap before the plant has time to get angry. With a dozen people a spreadsheet can still hold that. With a few dozen across three sites the sheet slips on the first Sunday someone copies the wrong week.
Hours the plant has to sign
The agency’s client is buying hours on their hall, not a post. Until those hours are confirmed, the invoice is a dispute rather than a document. In many firms confirmation still looks like this: a printout from the plant clock, a scan, an email, overtime written in by hand.
That is where the temporary-work hours register breaks. The agency has its list from the contract. The plant has its list from the gate or the shift notebook. A two-hour gap per person, across a few dozen people, eats a month of margin faster than an empty job ad.
A portal, or a simple client view in which they tick hours split by shift, night premium and overtime, closes the argument on settlement day, not in October. A status of “to confirm / confirmed / rejected with a comment” matters more than a pretty attendance chart.
Not every plant will enter a third-party programme. Then the options are an import from the file the plant already exports from its own clock, or an integration if the client has a stable format. What matters is that after the import the same hours record feeds both payroll and the invoice. Two imports into two spreadsheets return you to Wednesday in the example.
Pay from the contract, the invoice from confirmation
If 81 per cent of contracts in PFHR agencies are contracts of employment, the office is not only settling an hourly rate from a mandate. It is counting a full- or part-time post, absence, sick pay, leave, night premium, overtime. Pay has its own calendar: usually in arrears, no later than the tenth day of the following month. The client invoice follows a different path and often waits for a signature from the hall.
The split is built into the model. The agency pays the person first, then waits for the plant to confirm that those hours really happened. The more short assignments, the more such waiting confirmations in a single month. Falling FTE with a rising headcount is exactly that: more payrolls for fewer hours.
A panel that turns confirmed hours into both a payroll line and an invoice line will not replace the payroll package or KSeF. It can hand accounts ready lines: client, rate, hours, period, assignment number. The rest stays in the system the agency already uses.
Where the contract is a civil-law mandate, there is a separate duty to confirm hours on the assignment. That thread — and what an inspection of such contracts looks like — is covered separately in the piece on recording civil-law contracts in an agency. One sentence is enough here: the type of contract changes how you count; it does not remove the need for a single hours list.
Cover when someone does not arrive
Shorter assignments and no-shows feed each other. The more people rotate through a hall for a few days, the greater the chance that someone is missing on Monday. The plant will not wait for a recruitment process. It wants a person on the same shift, with the same medicals.
In an agency, cover often looks like this: the coordinator digs through an old “ready to send” spreadsheet, rings three people, one answers, the referral is built in a word processor, health and safety is “somewhere in the file”. Time from the call from the hall to the replacement walking in is measured in hours, not days. That day’s margin is already gone before anyone pastes a new row into the roster.
A candidate list with filters — site, role, valid medicals, availability for that shift, last client — shortens that loop to a few clicks and a call. It need not be a large ATS with a specialist hiring funnel. It is enough that the same pool used to send people on a standing assignment can show who can come onto the second shift today.
The jobs market did not stand still in the second quarter. 135,000 projects on Pracuj.pl and dearer ads mean the agency is competing for the same operators and warehouse staff as the plant that could hire them itself. Time from a gap on the shift to filling it is therefore a recruitment cost, not only a no-show cost.
The season on the hall and in the warehouse
The chamber report puts most temporary work into production and services. September does not look the same in those two worlds. After the holidays the hall returns to a full shift. An e-commerce warehouse was already preparing for autumn in August. An agency that serves both has, in one week, holiday cover winding down and a peak intake starting.
The season also shows in the first-quarter figures: PFHR then blamed the winter drop in hours on the calendar. The second quarter should be fuller. FTE still fell year on year. The flexibility the chamber describes looks, in an agency office, like more frequent opening and closing of referrals, not like one stable roster for the quarter.
An assignment calendar for each site — from when to when, how many people per shift, what buffer for no-shows — makes it visible that the warehouse is asking for twelve people from Monday, and the “available” pool has eight with valid medicals. That is invisible when each assignment lives in a separate message from the account manager.
With that calendar the agency can also tell the client honestly how many people it can actually deliver, before the plant draws up a production plan nobody will staff. It is a count of referrals and availability from the same list that produces the morning cover, not a GUS forecast.
The spreadsheet, payroll and the accounts sitting side by side
In a small agency the roles sit on two or three people: recruitment, coordination, payroll. Files multiply faster than office posts. One sheet is cover. The second is hours from the plant. The third is rates. A fourth goes to the bookkeeper. After a year nobody remembers which one is the source.
The payroll package and the accounts package stay. KSeF and the filings to ZUS stay where they are. What is missing is a layer that holds the assignment as one object: client, site, person, period, hours, confirmation status, pay status. Without it every change on the hall means patching three places by hand.
An assignment card that can survive a month usually holds these fields:
- client, site, shift and role
- person, contract type, worker rate and client rate
- referral: from–to, required medicals, health and safety
- attendance that day: arrived, no-show, replacement
- hours: planned, worked, confirmed by the plant, rejected
- settlement status: to pay, invoiced, in dispute
Without these fields Monday’s hole and Wednesday’s spreadsheet from the example come back every week. An off-the-shelf programme for a staffing agency already has some of these fields. The question is whether it also has hours confirmation on the client side, and whether it can hand payroll the lines the agency does not want to retype.
When a spreadsheet is enough, and when a separate panel is not
A dozen people at one client, one plant, one person in the office who knows every shift by name — a spreadsheet will do. The cost of a mistake is small, because the mistake shows up at the desk, not across three sites.
Ready-made recruitment SaaS makes sense when the agency lives off permanent hiring and RPO, not off hours on the hall. Recruitment in the PFHR report grew faster than temporary-work FTE. A different process, a different programme. Dragging an ATS onto attendance on the second shift ends in fields nobody fills in.
A ready-made timesheet makes sense when the plant agrees to confirm hours in it. Often it will not: it has its own clock, its own security, its own ban on installing anything. Then you are left with an import, a portal used only for ticking, or a paper sheet nobody likes but which comes back signed.
A dedicated panel starts to pay when the agency has several clients with different ways of confirming hours, a few dozen people in rotation, and an export into existing payroll. Or when the process is unusual: night shifts, two rates on the same role, billing by the line rather than by the hour. Then it is cheaper to fit the programme to the flow than to pretend the flow fits a box. The broader comparison of off-the-shelf software and software built to order still holds: map the data first, then decide.
One assignment card instead of three files
GESOFT builds panels and applications around a specific flow, not around an industry catalogue. In the agency from the example that usually means three things already in this piece: shared shift cover, hours confirmation on the plant side, and payroll and invoice lines from the same record.
On top of that comes a list of people ready as cover, with medical status, if recruitment and coordination sit in the same office. Payroll and accounts do not have to be moved at once. It is enough that those two teams receive a file or an API that does not have to be glued together by hand on Sunday.
The PFHR report does not tell anyone to buy software. It shows that in the second quarter of 2026 agencies were settling more people for fewer hours. Anyone handling that split with three spreadsheets will, in the production and warehouse season, spend longer counting no-shows and disputed hours than the shift itself lasts.
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