What actually has to happen in the first five days?
More than most desks have written down, and the clock starts on day one of the placement, not on the day the invoice goes out.
The Workplace Relations Commission sets it out under the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 as amended. The Day 5 statement, the section 3(1A) statement, is the one with the clock on it: an employer must notify each new employee, in writing, within five days of commencement of employment, of eleven core terms. Not five. Eleven. Names, employer address, place of work, job title, start date, probation, the duration of a temporary or fixed-term contract, remuneration and how it is paid, expected hours, terms relating to hours including overtime, and the tips policy where it applies.
Then the fuller written statement, the section 3(1) statement, within one month. For an agency that one carries a line the client version does not: if the worker is a temporary agency worker, the statement must give the identity of the user undertakings. The place they are actually working is part of the statutory paperwork, not a detail on the side.
This lands on the agency, not the client, because of one sentence on the same WRC page. "In the case of agency workers, the party who pays the wages is the employer for the purposes of this Act and is responsible for providing the written statement." If you run the payroll, the five-day clock is yours.
Revenue runs in parallel. You request a Revenue Payroll Notification for the new employee, and the commencement date goes on the first payroll submission. Where no RPN is available to download, the employee is taxed on an emergency basis, which is what the worker notices in their first payslip.
None of it is hard. It is five or six things inside a week that also contains the next placement.
What exactly gets automated?
The typing, the sending, the proving and the watching.
Pre-fill. The contract and the Day 5 statement are drafted from the placement record you already hold: names, start date, rate, hours, site, client. One entry, not four, and the eleven core terms become a checklist the draft cannot leave incomplete rather than a memory test.
Routing and chasing. The document goes out through your e-signature provider, and the chase runs on a schedule instead of on whether anyone remembered. The point is not politeness. The five-day statement is the thing most likely to be sitting in somebody's drafts on day four.
Proof, kept. The WRC is specific about the form these statements take. They "must be signed and dated by or on behalf of the employer, be in writing", and may be sent electronically provided the information is accessible to the employee, can be stored and printed, and "proof of transmission or receipt retained by employer". A workflow that sends and forgets meets half of that. The retained proof is the half that matters later.
Filing and indexing. The executed copy lands in one place, named the same way every time, indexed against the placement, worker and client.
Expiry tracking. Permits, certificates, insurance, tickets, whatever your sector requires, each with its date and an alert before it lapses rather than after. The change rule belongs here too: an employer must notify the employee of any change to the particulars in the written statement not later than the day on which the change takes effect. Rate changes and site moves are paperwork events, not only payroll events.
What still needs a person?
Signing, judging, and anything a regulator would read.
We do not replace your e-signature provider and we do not build a signing mechanism of our own. The legal validity of the signature stays where it already sits, and the workflow drives that provider rather than standing in for it. If you do not have one, choosing it is a decision for you and your advisers, not a line item in a build.
Right-to-work and permit checks stay with a person. The workflow records that the check was done, by whom, and when the document expires. It does not decide whether a document is genuine.
The terms themselves are yours. The templates come from whoever advises you on employment contracts, and we automate the filling of them. A system that drafts its own clauses has quietly become your employment lawyer.
Will it hold up if somebody inspects?
That depends on whether the record was made as the work happened. That is the real argument for building this.
The WRC publishes the list of statutory employment records an employer is obliged to maintain, and it reads close to a specification: employer registration number with Revenue, name, address and PPS number for each employee, terms of employment, payroll details, payslips, job classifications, commencement and termination dates, hours of work, holiday and public holiday entitlements, and "any documentation necessary to demonstrate compliance with employment rights legislation". The WRC adds, in its own brackets, that an inspector "has the power to seek full access to these records in the course of an inspection".
An agency carries a second layer. Under the Employment Agency Act 1971 an employment agency must hold a licence to carry on its business, renewed yearly, and WRC inspectors may at all reasonable times enter the premises and "inspect such books and records relating to the business of the agency as are required to be kept under the Act".
The third route is the one an agency is most likely to meet first. An employee can refer a complaint to the WRC over a failure to provide the core terms inside five days, a failure to provide the statement inside a month, or a statement that is deliberately false or misleading. Where a complaint is upheld, compensation may be awarded "not exceeding four weeks' remuneration".
An indexed file with dates and proof of transmission answers all three the same way. A shared drive and somebody's memory answers none of them well.
How do you know it worked?
Four numbers, taken before anything is built.
Days from offer accepted to executed contract filed. The proportion of placements where the Day 5 statement demonstrably went out inside five days, read from the record rather than from recollection, which is usually the number that surprises people. The count of documents across the live book that are expired or whose expiry date nobody knows. And hours per placement spent on paperwork after the offer.
Take three months of history on those before we start. If they do not move, the build did not work, and we would rather find that out on your desk than argue about it later.
What could go wrong?
A wrong template, now wrong at scale. Automation makes a good template consistent and a bad one systematic. Whoever advises you on contracts signs the templates off first.
Sending mistaken for compliance. If the workflow sends the statement and keeps no proof of transmission or receipt, you have automated the easy half. The retained proof is the deliverable.
Alerts nobody owns. An expiry alert with no named person behind it becomes noise inside a month, and noise is worse than no alert because it feels like cover.
Assuming the clock is somebody else's. The obligation follows whoever pays the wages. Where a worker is paid by the client or engaged on a different footing, that needs your own advice rather than an assumption inherited from the last arrangement.
Keeping everything forever. The Data Protection Commission puts it plainly: personal data "should only be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for as long as is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed". A tidy automated file grows faster than an untidy manual one, so retention is a decision to make at build time.
How long does it take to put in?
Two to four weeks for one desk.
A session on how the paperwork actually runs, with the points where it stalls named out loud. A build tested against the last ten placements you made, so you can see what it would have caught and what it would not. A parallel run on two or three live placements. Then handover, with the documentation of what runs, what it retains and who owns each alert.
Then we leave. No retainer, you own what was built, and you can change a template without calling us. If you want to work out whether this is the right thing to automate first, that conversation is the opportunity review, and it starts with your last five placements rather than with software.
Questions we get asked
What has to be given to a new employee within five days in Ireland? Eleven core terms, in writing. The WRC calls it the Day 5 statement, made under section 3(1A) of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 as amended. It covers names, employer address, place of work, job title, start date, probation, the duration of a temporary or fixed-term contract, remuneration and how it is paid, expected hours, terms on hours including overtime, and the tips policy where it applies.
On an agency placement, is the paperwork the agency's responsibility or the client's? The WRC is direct. "In the case of agency workers, the party who pays the wages is the employer for the purposes of this Act and is responsible for providing the written statement." If your agency runs the payroll, the five-day clock and the one-month statement are yours. The one-month statement must also name the user undertaking, the client the worker is placed with.
Can a statement of terms of employment be sent and signed electronically in Ireland? Yes, with conditions the WRC spells out. Statements must be signed and dated by or on behalf of the employer and be in writing, and may be transmitted electronically provided the information is accessible to the employee, can be stored and printed, and proof of transmission or receipt is retained by the employer. That last condition is the one an automated workflow is good at and a manual process usually is not.
What records would a WRC inspector ask a recruitment agency to see? The WRC publishes the list. Employer registration number with Revenue, name, address and PPSN for each employee, terms of employment, payroll details, payslips, job classifications, commencement and termination dates, hours of work, and holiday entitlements, plus any documentation needed to demonstrate compliance with employment rights legislation. An inspector may seek full access to those records during an inspection.
Does automating placement paperwork mean an AI makes decisions? No. The workflow fills documents from a record you already hold, routes them, chases them, files them and watches expiry dates. It does not assess a candidate, judge a document's authenticity, or draft contract terms. Signing stays with a person and your e-signature provider, and a permit check stays a human check the system records rather than performs.