What it is
Net Fee Income (NFI) is the revenue a recruitment agency actually keeps from a placement once the direct cost of generating that revenue is stripped out of gross billings. On a permanent desk NFI usually sits close to the full placement fee, since there is little pass-through cost once split-fee shares or referral payouts are accounted for. On a temp or contract desk it is only the margin between the bill rate and the pay rate, not the full invoice value, because the worker's wage passes straight through the agency to the candidate and was never really the agency's revenue to begin with.
Agencies also call this figure gross profit, and the two terms are used interchangeably in most reporting. Larger, listed staffing groups report NFI as their headline profitability number specifically because it strips out the pass-through wage cost that inflates gross billings on a temp-heavy desk without saying anything about what the agency actually earned.
Billings tell you what was invoiced. NFI tells you what the agency actually kept.
Why it matters
Billings alone flatter temp-heavy desks, because the invoice includes the worker's wage passed straight through the agency, inflating revenue without inflating what the agency actually keeps. Two desks can post similar billings and land in very different places on NFI: one running high-margin permanent placements, the other running thin-margin temp fills that look larger on the board but leave less behind once the pass-through cost is stripped out.
NFI is also the figure that commission plans, desk targets and business valuations are actually built on, not billings. It is standard industry practice to value a recruitment business on a multiple of NFI rather than turnover, because turnover on a temp-heavy book says more about the size of the payroll being run through the agency than about what the business is actually worth. An owner who only watches billings can be blindsided by a desk that looks busy but contributes little once rebates, clawbacks and split-fee shares are netted out.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not touch invoicing, payroll or fee calculation, that stays with the agency's own finance system. What it changes is the volume of NFI-generating opportunity that reaches a consultant in the first place. Your AI sales employee finds and enriches companies that match your ICP, detects buying signals that indicate a role or a contract is about to open, and drafts outreach so a consultant's time goes towards fee-earning conversations rather than cold prospecting that may never convert.
Because the Company Brain tracks which signals and accounts a consultant actually converted, an agency can see which targeting patterns are producing NFI and which are just generating busy billings. Over time that turns NFI from a number finance calculates at month end into a feedback loop that sharpens which accounts and signal types the AI sales employee prioritises next, without adding a BD hire or a data seat to the cost base that NFI is ultimately measured against.
