In there are three methods you can use to work with subcontractors and technicians on jobs, depending on their working relationship with your organisation.
Subcontractors as suppliers or staff
You can set up subcontractors so they are treated as staff or suppliers (or both).
- Subcontractor as a supplier: they will not be classified as a user of , and will be subscription free.
- Subcontractor as a staff member: there will be a subscription payable for them, the cost of which will depend on the number of users you have in your account.
Method 1 - The subcontractor as a supplier
Where you do not track (and directly charge out) the subcontractor's hourly time, they are just a direct cost on the job that you invoice out for a margin.
You will need to:
- Set up the contractor as a supplier.
- Create a Purchase Order using the Financials tab of the job itself.
- Fully receipt the Purchase Order with their invoice, when you receive it. This will push their invoice across into your accounting system, while capturing their cost to you against the job for you to on-charge the client (at a markup).
Method 2 - The subcontractor as a staff member
Where you have a close relationship with the contractor and:
- they act almost as employees
- you wish to capture their time against jobs
- they invoice you based on the hours they have captured by writing timesheets in
- they have a standard cost per hour to the business.
In this scenario, set up the contractor as a staff member, with a standard base rate (their standard cost to you per hour) and a billable rate (what you charge them out at per hour).
Note that:
- They will fill in their timesheets on the system and you will invoice their time out.
- They can be given access to run a report out of , which reports on their total hours worked, and will subsequently prepare their invoice for that time, which they will issue to you.
- Because you are already capturing the cost of the sub-contractor via their base rate, their invoice can be entered directly into your accounting system – it doesn’t need to be entered as a cost against the job.
- Because they are set up as staff members, they can enter their own timesheets, from anywhere and from any device.
Method 3 - Hybrid method
Where you wish to record a subcontractor's time but their cost is not a standard base rate then:
- Set up the subcontractor as staff with a base rate of 0 (zero) and billable rate that you would charge to the client. This way you will be capturing their time against the job and invoicing it appropriately, however we are not capturing the cost of their labour on the job yet.
- Set up the subcontractor as a supplier (in addition to being staff).
- The subcontractor will send an invoice for their time. Create a Purchase Order either against the Financial tab of the job they were working on, or where they were working on multiple jobs raise a Bulk Purchase Order from the Purchase Order Manager.
- Fully receipt the Purchase Order with their invoice. This will push the subcontractor invoice across to your accounting system either via the interface or via file export, and add the costs of the subcontractor against the job.
- Mark the costs (that have been added to the job) as non-billable.