Staffing Agencies: Cube vs Mosaic for the Pay Bill Spread

Calculate the gap between when you pay a contractor (typically weekly) and when the client pays you (typically 30 to 45 days after invoicing) as its own number, in days, and multiply it against your average weekly contractor payroll to get a working capital requirement. This is the single most important number in a staffing agency's model, and it's the one most budgets skip entirely in favor of a simple revenue and margin forecast.

Cube lets you build this funding-gap calculation directly as a formula tied to your actual contractor payroll and client payment terms. Mosaic doesn't have a native concept of a payroll-to-collection funding gap, since it wasn't built for a business that pays out before it collects, so this becomes a custom calculation in either tool, with Cube's spreadsheet format making the formula easier to trace and adjust.

A single blended margin percentage across your whole contractor book hides which requisitions are actually profitable. A highly competitive requisition might carry a thin spread while a specialized or hard-to-fill role carries a wide one, and averaging them together means a shift in your mix toward more competitive, lower-margin roles can go unnoticed for a full quarter.

Track the pay-bill spread at the requisition level, and roll it up by client and by skill category so you can see which parts of the book are actually funding the rest. Build this as a granular table in whichever tool you use, since neither ships this specific calculation pre-built.

Permanent placement fees, typically a percentage of the placed candidate's first-year salary, land as a single lump sum rather than accruing over time the way contractor margin does, which means they should be forecast with their own timing assumption based on your placement pipeline, not blended into contractor revenue as if it arrived evenly.

Wage growth matters here too, since perm placement fees are usually tied to the candidate's salary: overall wage growth for civilian workers has been running at 3.4% year over year¹, which is worth building into your average placement-fee assumption if you haven't updated it recently.

Once you know the funding gap in days and the pay-bill spread by requisition, combine them into a rolling 13-week cash forecast that shows exactly when growth will strain your credit line or cash reserve, before it happens rather than after. A desk that's winning more business than its funding can support isn't actually growing profitably, it's just borrowing against next quarter.

• List every active contractor with their weekly pay rate and the client's payment terms.
• Calculate the funding gap in dollars for the current book, updated weekly.
• Layer perm placement fees on top using your pipeline's expected close timing, not an even monthly assumption.
• Compare the total against your available credit line or cash reserve, and flag the week it would run short under current growth assumptions.

Cube supports this as a connected model where the funding gap, spread, and placement pipeline all feed the same cash forecast. Mosaic can display the resulting cash position once the inputs are calculated, but building the funding-gap logic itself will require custom configuration regardless of which platform holds the final view.

Once the funding gap is visible in dollars, you have a real decision to make about how to finance it: a traditional credit line against receivables, invoice factoring at a discount, or simply slower, self-funded growth that matches new contractor starts to available cash. Each option has a real cost, whether interest, a factoring discount, or opportunity cost from turning down business you can't currently fund.

Model all three options against your actual funding-gap forecast rather than choosing based on which one sounds simplest. A desk growing fast enough that the funding gap doubles within two quarters usually needs external financing lined up before the gap arrives, not after a payroll run gets tight.