Every region, a different timesheet

In Quebec’s public health network, the shift is still closed on paper. The agency resource finishes at the CLSC or the hospital, the timesheet is signed on the spot, scanned or photographed, and emailed to the agency. Then someone keys it in, line by line.

It is easy to file this under inertia. It isn’t. The signature on that sheet is the proof that the shift happened — it is what the invoice rests on. Nobody is going to give that up because a portal would be tidier. The paper is doing a job.

The cost isn’t the paper. It’s everything that happens after it.

And every region prints its own

There is no single provincial timesheet. Each region has its own: its own layout, its own field names, its own idea of where the hours, the breaks and the activity codes belong. An agency placing resources across several regions is handling several formats — every week.

This is what defeats the obvious technical answer. Template-based extraction — read the box at these coordinates, then the box at those — works beautifully on one sheet and collapses on the next. And the sheets are not scanned under laboratory conditions: they are phone photographs taken at the end of a shift, at an angle, in bad light, sometimes creased.

An agent that works the mailbox

I built an email agent for exactly this. The timesheets already arrive by email as attachments, so that is where the agent lives. It watches the mailbox, picks up the scans, reads them, and writes the hours into Rekruti against the right resource, the right client and the right shift.

The part that matters most is what it does not change. Nobody in the field has to log into anything, learn anything, or remember a new habit. The establishment signs the sheet the way it always has, and it gets emailed the way it always has. The change is entirely on the agency’s side of the wire.

Reading is the easy part

A vision model reads handwriting well. That is not the hard problem. The hard problem is knowing when it read wrong.

A 3 that could be an 8. A start time of 7:30 that could be 7:00. A line crossed out and rewritten in the margin. Faced with any of those, the model does not hesitate — it returns an answer with exactly the same confidence it uses for everything else. And a silent error in hours is not a typo. It is a payroll error and an invoice error, and it surfaces weeks later in a dispute.

Two readings, then a confidence level

So the sheet is not read once. It goes through several independent readings — different models, working separately, with no knowledge of each other’s answers — and the results are compared field by field.

One model getting a field wrong is predictable. Several models, built and trained differently, getting the same field wrong in the same way is far rarer. That comparison is what turns a confident answer into a measured one.

Where the readings agree, the data goes straight into Rekruti. Where they differ, the timesheet is held and flagged: the cropped image of the field in question is shown beside the candidate values, and one click settles it. Nobody re-reads a whole sheet. You arbitrate the one field that is actually in doubt.

A system that tells you when it isn’t sure is worth more than one that is always confident.

What actually changes

Work that was human-intensive and genuinely laborious drops by roughly 90% on what we have measured so far. Not because the AI is trusted blindly, but because human attention is spent only where there is doubt — and the amount of doubt is now something you can see.

The second effect is quieter and probably larger. Because the hours land inside Rekruti rather than in a spreadsheet, everything downstream simply continues: timesheet to payroll to invoice, with no second transcription and no re-keying between systems. The paper stops being a bottleneck and becomes what it always was — a signature.

Coming as standard

This is being folded into the standard Rekruti offer. Agencies working with Quebec’s health network are where it pays off first, for the obvious reason that they carry the most formats. But nothing about the approach is specific to Quebec. It applies anywhere the sheet is signed on paper and the format changes depending on who signed it.

If your team is still keying in timesheets by hand, that is the part worth looking at first. Book a demo and we will go through it with your own sheets.