Glossary
The words this work runs on
Defined the way a practitioner would, not the way a marketing page would. Half of these are staffing terms a manufacturer would not know; the other half are Indian finance terms a staffing firm would not know.
Staffing and recruitment
Submittal
also Submission- A submittal is the formal act of presenting a candidate to a client for a specific requisition, together with the CV and summary the client receives.
- It is the point at which a recruitment desk is most exposed: once a candidate has gone to a client, a duplicate becomes a conversation with the account manager and an unsigned right to represent becomes a dispute with another agency.
- Where a recruitment desk actually loses its week
Right to represent
also RTR- A right to represent is a candidate's written authorisation for one agency to submit them to one named client, for a defined period.
- It is per client, not per candidate. Treating a signed RTR as blanket permission to submit someone anywhere is a common and expensive shortcut, because it is how two agencies end up claiming the same placement.
Duplicate submittal
- A duplicate submittal is the same candidate being presented to the same client twice, whether by two recruiters at one agency or by two agencies competing for the same role.
- Checking for one is trivial; missing one can cost a client relationship. It is also the check most often done from memory, because it depends on knowing what a colleague did weeks ago.
VMS
also Vendor management system- A VMS is the software an enterprise or MSP uses to manage contingent workers — distributing requisitions to supplier agencies, enforcing rate cards, and handling timesheets and invoicing in one place.
- SAP Fieldglass, Beeline and Workday VNDLY are the common ones. For a supplier agency the significant fact is that you work inside a system you do not control and usually cannot integrate with directly.
MSP
also Managed service provider- In contingent staffing, an MSP is a company that runs an employer's contract workforce programme on their behalf, managing the panel of supplier agencies and the technology they work through.
Bill rate
- The bill rate is the hourly amount a staffing agency charges its client for a contract worker, as distinct from the pay rate the worker receives.
- The difference between the two is the spread, and the spread as a percentage of the bill rate is the margin. Confusing markup with margin is the most common arithmetic error in staffing pricing.
Redeployment
- Redeployment is placing a contractor into a new assignment when their current one ends, rather than letting them leave the agency's book.
- It is the cheapest placement an agency can make, because the candidate is known, already compliant and already willing to contract.
- Your database is a better source than your job board
Database reactivation
also Candidate rediscovery, Database re-mining- Database reactivation is sourcing candidates from an agency's own existing records rather than from a job board or a new search.
- It usually fails for a specific reason: the records have decayed and the useful information sits in free-text notes that keyword search cannot reach. The bottleneck is data quality, not matching.
- Your database is a better source than your job board
Bench
- The bench is the group of consultants an agency employs who are not currently on a billable assignment.
- Common in IT staffing and C2C arrangements, where an agency carries the cost of a consultant between placements and markets them actively.
C2C
also Corp-to-corp- Corp-to-corp is an arrangement in which a staffing agency contracts with a consultant's own incorporated company rather than engaging them as an employee or individual contractor.
ATS
also Applicant tracking system- An ATS is the system of record a recruitment agency uses to hold candidates, requisitions, submittals and placements.
- Bullhorn, JobDiva and Ceipal are common in staffing. Its search is typically keyword-based over structured fields, which is why it rarely surfaces the useful content held in recruiter notes.
Finance and operations
Three-way matching
- Three-way matching is the control of not paying a supplier invoice until the purchase order, the goods receipt note and the invoice agree on what was ordered, what arrived and what is being charged.
- Two-way matching compares the order to the invoice only, which leaves the main risk — goods invoiced but never received — uncovered.
- Three-way matching, and why it breaks in small manufacturing
GRN
also Goods receipt note- A goods receipt note records what physically arrived against a purchase order, in what quantity and condition.
- It is the document most often recorded late or on paper, which is why an invoice frequently reaches accounts payable before the receipt it should be matched against.
GSTR-2B
- GSTR-2B is a static, auto-drafted statement of input tax credit generated monthly for a GST-registered business from what its suppliers have filed.
- It differs from GSTR-2A, which is dynamic and keeps changing. Because 2B is static for a period, it is the one to reconcile a purchase register against — reconciling to a moving target is what makes the exercise impossible to close.
- Purchase invoice reconciliation against GSTR-2B
Input tax credit
also ITC- Input tax credit is the GST a business has paid on its purchases, which it may set off against the GST it collects on its sales.
- Whether a particular credit may be claimed is a tax question for your own advisers. The operational problem is separate and mechanical: establishing which invoices in your books correspond to which entries in the statement.
- Purchase invoice reconciliation against GSTR-2B
Tolerance
- In invoice matching, a tolerance is the amount by which a document may disagree with its purchase order before the difference is treated as an exception requiring a person.
- It is where the control actually lives. Set too tight, every rounding difference becomes an exception and the check gets switched off; set too loose, a real price change passes unnoticed.
- Three-way matching, and why it breaks in small manufacturing
TDL
also Tally Definition Language- TDL is the customisation language used to add fields, reports and behaviour inside Tally.
- Worth knowing what TDL customisation already exists in an installation before planning any integration, because it frequently explains why the data does not look the way the documentation suggests.
- Integrating with Tally without replacing it
Exception queue
- An exception queue is the list of items a rules-based process could not clear on its own and has routed to a person, with the reason attached.
- It is the part of an automation that determines whether it is trusted. A queue everything lands in gets ignored; one nothing lands in usually means the rules are not checking anything.
Where we take a position rather than state a definition, the second paragraph says so. Everything here is meant to be correct if you quote it somewhere else with no attribution — which is the only real test of a glossary.
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