Winning
prescription served up for recruiters and their clients through innovative VAT reduction
By David Thornhill, MD of Simplicity
When you come to think of it,
a volatile jobs market produces losers and winners each and every day. That’s
what keeps the wheels of recruitment turning.
But for some specialist
recruiters the niche locum market has proved to be a tempting pool in which to
fish; matching the best in class doctor, vet, lawyer, accountant or teacher to
act as the ‘place holder’ or ‘locum tenens’ (in Latin) for the incumbent.
However many recruiters and clients are missing a trick on how to dramatically
reduce their VAT burden and produce a win-win for both parties.
But, to illustrate my point,
let’s just focus here on the health sector. The NHS is in an unenviable yet
well publicised ‘Catch-22 position’. On one hand it needs to provide the best
possible care to its patients but on the other hand this has to be achieved with
a budget that’s stretched more than ever. This essentially leaves bosses in
difficult position regarding how to make the most of the funding they receive
from the Department of Health. There are stories almost every day in the media
reporting on the latest service being shut down, highlighting the pressures
healthcare providers face on a daily basis.
This pressure filters
throughout the supply chain, affecting staff and suppliers – including
recruitment agencies – who also face such funding restrictions.
A report was published last
year which found the NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world with 1.7
million employees; in case you are wondering, the US Department of Defence came
in first with 3.2 million employees, (to help put this into perspective)
followed closely by the Chinese Army and McDonalds. Clearly employing this many
workers mean the NHS faces huge recruitment costs, including locums, but there
are options that are specifically designed to help healthcare providers to
stretch their limited budgets.
There are roughly 3,500 locum
doctors working in NHS hospitals every day, plus more than 15,000 standing in
for your local GP; as a result, in just two years, locums cost the NHS the unhealthy
sum of more than £2 billion![1] Across
the UK, approximately 50 recruitment agencies provide the health service with locums
and from these agencies, roughly 80 per cent of all vacancies are filled.
This doesn’t mean, however,
that the healthcare sector has to be in a meltdown over its recruitment costs.
At Simplicity, we realised
that some of our products are perfectly placed to help agencies who supply interim
staff to healthcare organisations. Armed with innovative solutions we have made
inroads into supporting the medical recruitment sector.
If you’re supplying any locum
staff and charging VAT, that makes you a perfect candidate for vatsimply. Did
we also mention it can be FREE
to recruitment agencies?!
vatsimply can help to reduce
your clients unrecoverable VAT burden by up to 80%. But the real beauty of vatsimply
is that it has the potential to help both the agencies who provide the locums,
of which there are around 50 at present working within the healthcare sector,
but also allows the client to importantly save money by stretching their
budgets further. This happens by working together, something which doesn’t
happen enough these days.
The recruitment agency will
find the locum doctors and deal with the necessary admin; we will then agree
with the client a system by which we can pay those doctors for them. And the
only invoices we send them relate to payroll and admin services.
Nowadays, especially in the healthcare
industry, the aim is reduce expenditure as much as possible without affecting
the level of care provided; sadly this is not always possible. We’re all
familiar with the Government’s struggle to cut back the budget deficit and this
means some public services are under intense pressure to deliver cut and
maintain service levels.
I have many friends over in
the States and they are in awe of our NHS; free healthcare at point of need is
a gold standard recognised worldwide and is something to be proud of, as spotlighted
in the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, if in a slightly strange way!
We created vatsimply to help clients
reduce their overall recruitment costs by more than 10 per cent; money which in
this example could be put back into providing better care for patients. vatsimply
is structured so that agencies who use it can benefit from using it free of
charge.
So the moral of this story; you
can have altruistic reasons and be a profitable business. No moral dilemma
there!
For more information on how
we could help your recruitment agency or hospital, visit www.simplicityinbusiness.com or call 01594 546585.
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