KB: Managing your Sub-Contractors’ Work

Introduction

Many businesses hire subcontractors for many reasons. Managing tickets, appointments, tasks, and charges through your subcontractors is required so you can keep log about these activities. This article provides some guidelines on how to work with and track subcontractors you work with in CommitCRM.

Working With Subcontractors

Working with subcontractors in CommitCRM is best achieved by defining subcontractors as restricted employees in CommitCRM and letting them access via CommitCRM Web Interface. Alternatively, you can let subcontractors access the system using a Customer Web User via the Customers Web Portal.

Managing Subcontractors as Employees

When working with subcontractors as Employees, you can restrict their access to only specific Accounts and restrict what they can do in the system. See more details about the official way to manage subcontractors in Subcontractors.

Benefits of managing your subcontractors as employees:

1. Your subcontractors can log their own work directly into the system. This includes Charges, History Notes, Appointments, Tasks, etc.
2. Subcontractor work is automatically included in CommitCRM Reports such as Time reports, Charge reports and Activity reports.
3. Recycle Active Employee Licenses when a subcontractor is not active.
4. Limit your subcontractor to only be able to log into the CommitCRM Web Interface for Employees, see only specific Accounts and access only their own Tickets.

Read more about managing Subcontractors using Employee licenses.

Although using employees as your subcontractor is the recommended way to go about it, note that this requires an employee license per active subcontractor. If you want to avoid adding more employee licenses, you may consider an alternative way for working with subcontractors by letting them access the system as customers via the Customers Web portal. This alternative is limited and requires more manual management on your side; however, you may find it useful for your needs

Managing Subcontractors as Customer Web Users

Working with subcontractors as customers via the Web Portal is an alternative way to manage subcontractors. Subcontractors logging into as customers via the Web Portal can create new tickets and update existing tickets; however, they don't have access to all information and they can only update some Ticket details and add History Notes.

Using this method not as complete as managing your subcontractors as an Employees, since the subcontractor will not be able to resolve tasks or appointments, add Charges, close Tickets, and so on. However, it does not require additional Active Employee Licenses, so you can manage many active subcontractors simply by adding Customer Web Users for them.

As customer Web users subcontractors can create Tickets and update the Tickets details, or add History Notes. It is then your responsibility to actually close the ticket when appropriate (which is not a bad idea since this way you have close supervision over their Tickets), and add the Charges for their work.

Adding Charges from History Notes
Once a subcontractor adds a History Note to update work performed for a Ticket, it is easy to convert the History Notes into a charge by opening the History Note > Clicking Go Advanced > More Actions > New Labor Charge from History Note. This way, all the text entered in the History Note gets copied to the new charge that has been created.

You can read more about tracking subcontractors as customer Web user in Logging Subcontractors' Work.

See Also

Logging sub-contractors Work