When acting as an Employment Agency, companies will need to adopt a different workflow than they might be used to.

To see if the below workflow is relevant to your company, read our documentation here which covers what an Employment Agency is, what an Employment Business is, and why the distinction is important.

Please bear in mind, this workflow may only apply to some of the lessons you provide and not others.

In order to act as an Employment Agency, the first thing you need to do is ensure that you are using Stripe Connect. This is a requirement. You can read more about Stripe Express and how to make the change here.

Once you are using Stripe Express, you can go to System > Settings > Accounting Settings > General, and tick the box for "Operate as an Employment Agency".

Once the above is ticked, you will be presented with a second option, just below it which will read "By default, you operate as an Employment Agency with each client" with an option to select True or False.

If you plan to act as an Employment Agency under any circumstances, tick the box for True here.

Next, you can choose whether to use Split Payments only in cases in which you are acting as an Employment Agency, or for everything.

To make this choice go to System > Settings > Card Payment Integration with Stripe (Express).

This gives you the option to:

In either case, all charges issued as an Employment Agency will be done using Split Payments. If you want other charges to also be invoiced via Split Payments, select the first option.

Finally, you can choose on a client-by-client basis who you will be working with as an Employment Agency. To toggle that setting for each Client go to the client's profile, under Actions, select edit, and under Accounting and Client Manager you can toggle the "Operate as an Employment Agency" override.

There are a few very important aspects of invoicing as an Employment Agency which make it different to other workflows that you might be used to:

When operating as an Employment Agency, tutors decide when a lesson is invoiced.

After marking a lesson as complete, tutors will be shown a popup asking them whether or not they want an invoice to be sent for that lesson at the same time.

If the tutor chooses to send the invoice at that time, the invoice will be sent, and, if the client has their card details saved to their account, it will be automatically charged after a delay of two days. If the client does not have card details saved to their account, they will have to add their card details via the email sent to them.

If the tutor chooses not to invoice for the lesson at the same time that it is marked as complete then they will be able to return to the lesson at a later stage and send the invoice retrospectively. They will be prompted to do this for un-invoiced lessons via their dashboard. Even when a tutor sends invoices retrospectively for multiple lessons, invoices will be created for each lesson separately, and emails will be sent separately for each.

You can read the full process from a tutor's perspective on our Tutors' Guide here.

Once invoices have been sent, any saved card details will be charged automatically after two days. Otherwise, the client will have the option to pay manually.

When the invoice is sent, it will also create a Payment Order for tutors. Payment Orders will display the associated invoice number and the payment status of the connected invoice. It will not show the tutor the full invoice breakdown of charges.

Once payment has been made, the funds will show in the tutor's Stripe balance in 7 days' time. Once showing in the tutor's Stripe balance, they can be manually withdrawn, otherwise their Stripe balance will be automatically withdrawn to their bank account once per month. Read more about here.

We have recently changed how Automatic Charging works for UK-based companies operating as Employment Agencies.

Going forward, you as a company get to decide who is automatically charged using the "Auto Charge" setting, which was previously outside of your control.

All you need to do is navigate to System > Settings > Accounting Settings > General > Auto Charge. Here, you can check whether Auto Charge is currently enabled or disabled for your company account as a whole.

After completing the previous step, you must also review the per-client toggle for any clients for whom you wish to apply specific considerations. To do this, go to the client's profile, then click on Actions > Edit > Accounting Settings > Auto Charge Override.

The delay before taking payments will always be two days after the invoice has been sent.

If the Client is not being auto charged, they will not have an option to pay without saving their card from now on. The Client will be required to save their card details first, only then they can proceed to complete payment. Post that, you can decide if you wish to auto charge the Client or not.

You can also accept bank transfers as payment of Employment Agency charges, which allows manual payments more easily.

While operating as an Employment Agency, you will not be able to void/cancel/delete any invoice without also refunding it.

Refunds will work in much the same way as they would otherwise.

To initiate a refund, click on the invoice in question. A button to refund the payment will appear on the top of the screen. Clicking that will show you a popup which gives you the chance to write in the reason for issuing this refund and specify its type from a dropdown menu.

If the tutor's Stripe balance is not sufficient to cover the cost of the refund, you will be given a choice as to whether or not to want to continue with the refund, with the company footing the bill for refunding the tutor's portion of the payment.

Another change to the ordinary workflow for invoicing will be the email communications to the client.

You will not have control over the content of the "payment request" email sent to clients. This means that you will not be able to prevent this email from sending, and you will not be able to edit the content of the email either.

There will also be a change to the accessibility of invoice PDF breakdowns via emails, which is discussed in more detail below.

When operating as an Employment Agency, a new, un-editable, Email Definition will be used, called "Payment request (operating as EA)". This emails will follow one of the two following formats, the first image shows this email in the situation in which the client has saved their card details and is being automatically charged, the second image shows an email sent to a client without saved card details:

The above emails will come from from the company email address (provided your email domain has been approved), but they will not include the company's logo.

When acting as an Employment Agency, companies are required to provide some way for clients to access the full PDF breakdown of invoice charges. This breakdown must include separate charges from both the tutor and the agency, which means that if a client sees an invoice PDF, they will see the specific amount taken by the tutor, and the amount taken by the company.

In order to meet this requirement, there are three ways in which a client may be able to access their invoice PDF, they are:

Invoice PDFs will not show the company's logo.