How do placement rules decide which billings a condition applies to?

Overview

Rules are managed under Placements > Settings, in the Rules section. They're defined once, at placement level, and are account-wide — not tied to an individual scheme. For example, a rule called "Confirmed" might match placements that are either Approved or Completed, while a rule called "Employee" might match placements that are Contract terms and have a custom field showing a specific contractor type.

Once a rule exists, you select it within a scheme for one of a few different purposes:

• Accumulation rules — whether a billing qualifies to accumulate towards the scheme at all.
• Confirmation rules — whether a billing qualifies for payment (separate from whether it accumulates).
• Modifier rulesets — whether a billing gets an automatic adjustment applied, such as a burden or a line-item filter.

The rule itself works the same way regardless of where it's used — the same "Confirmed" rule could be selected as an accumulation rule on one scheme and reused as part of a modifier ruleset on another. Each criterion within a rule checks something specific — whether a placement is approved, whether its terms are permanent or contract, whether a billing falls before a certain date, and so on.

Rules are checked twice:

• Against the whole placement. If the rule matches at this level, it applies to the placement and to every billing within it.
• Against each individual billing, for any rule that didn't already match at placement level. Only that specific billing is affected — not the whole placement.

This two-level check is what allows a rule to be as broad as "any permanent placement" or as narrow as "only billings dated after 1 April on this placement."

Criteria available

Each criterion can also be inverted — set to match when the condition isn't true (for example, "not approved" instead of "approved"). This is what makes ranges possible, covered below.

Matching ALL of a rule's criteria vs. ANY of them

Every rule has a Type setting — All or Any — which decides how its criteria are combined. All is the default.

• All: every criterion in the rule has to be satisfied.
• Any: at least one criterion has to be satisfied.

This choice matters more than it looks, especially once a rule mixes a placement-level criterion (like Approval) with a billing-level one (like Minimum margin):

• Under Any, if the placement-level criterion is satisfied on its own, the rule applies to the entire placement — every billing included — regardless of whether the billing-level criterion matches. In other words, a satisfied placement-level criterion under Any overrides the billing-level check entirely.
• Under All, if the placement-level criterion isn't satisfied, the rule doesn't apply at all — not even to individual billings that would otherwise match the billing-level criterion.

If a rule only contains billing-level criteria (no placement-level ones), it can only ever apply per-billing — it will never apply to a placement as a whole, no matter which combination type is set.

Building a range by pairing a criterion with its inverted opposite

A single "minimum" or "before" criterion is open-ended — it matches everything above (or before) the value you set. To build a bounded range, add the same criterion twice, ticking Inverted on the second one, and set the rule's Type to All.

Example: a margin band from 20% up to (but not including) 30%

1. Under Add Criteria, select Minimum Margin, enter 20%, and click Add Criteria.
2. Add Minimum Margin again, enter 30%, tick Inverted, and click Add Criteria — this gives you the upper bound.
3. Set the rule's Type to All.

The result matches margins of 20% and above, but strictly below 30%. A margin of exactly 20% is included; a margin of exactly 30% is not.

Example: billings dated from 1 January up to (but not including) 1 April

1. Add a Value Before Date criterion for 1 January, ticked Inverted (this gives you "not before," i.e. on or after).
2. Add a Value Before Date criterion for 1 April, left un-inverted.
3. Set the rule's Type to All.

A common mistake: setting a range rule to Any instead of All

If you build a range this way but leave (or switch) the Type to Any, the rule stops behaving as a range and matches almost everything instead — because every value is either above your lower bound or below your upper bound, so at least one of the two criteria is always satisfied. If a rule that's meant to isolate a specific band or window seems to be matching billings it shouldn't, this is the first thing to check: Placements > Settings > Rules, open the rule, and confirm the Type is set to All.

Minimum/maximum margin: is it before or after burdens?

This one catches people out often enough to call out on its own. Margin is calculated after pay and after any hourly-rate burden have already been applied, but before any burden that's driven by another rule (a percentage-based burden, for example). In practice:

• If a burden is a flat hourly rate, margin criteria will already reflect it.
• If a burden is applied by a rule elsewhere in your scheme (a percentage-based burden), a margin criterion won't yet reflect that burden's effect — it's evaluated on the figures as they stood before that burden was added.

Margin criteria never match permanent placements. A Minimum Margin criterion simply won't match anything on a permanent placement — there's no margin to evaluate. The trap is the inverted form: tick Inverted on a margin criterion (to use it as an upper bound, as in the range example above) and it's treated as satisfied for every billing on a permanent placement, because there's nothing to fail against. If a rule using an inverted margin criterion is firing unexpectedly across permanent placements, this is why — the rule may need an added Terms Type criterion to exclude permanent placements explicitly.

Other criteria worth knowing

• Company name ignores case and leading/trailing spaces, and supports partial matches (contains, starts with, ends with) as well as an exact match.
• Custom field is checked exactly and is case-sensitive, unlike company name. It can be set at placement level, billing level, or both — if you need it to catch changes on individual billings (rather than only the placement's own field), make sure it's added as a billing-level criterion.
• Days from start date counts from the placement's start date up to (but not including) the day count you set — so "within 30 days of start" covers days 0–29, not day 30 itself. Inverted, it matches both before the placement started and everything from day 30 onward.
• Value before date only ever applies at billing level — it has no placement-level equivalent, so it will never make a rule apply to a whole placement.

Need help?

If a rule isn't applying the way you expect, get in touch with your Konquest support contact with the rule name (from Placements > Settings > Rules) and an example placement or billing that's behaving unexpectedly — we can check the rule's criteria and Type setting against what you're trying to achieve.