KB: Managing your Sub-Contractors’ Work

Introduction

Many businesses hire sub-contractors for many reasons. Managing tickets, appointments, tasks, and charges through your sub-contractors are very important tasks, since you need to keep logs and possible report on these tasks to your customer. This article provides some guidelines on how to work with and track sub-contractors you work with in CommitCRM.

Working With sub-contractors

Working with contractors can be done in two possible ways:

1. Let sub-contractors access the system with a restricted employee user, or
2. Let sub-contractors access the system via the Customers Web portal.

Using an Employee Account for your contractor will require an Active Employee License for as long as the sub-contractors is marked Active in the system, while using the Commit Web Interface for Customers will allow you to manage your sub-contractors without using a license; however, this method does not offer the same level of management you would get with using an Employee Account for each contractor.

Working with sub-contractors As Employees

If you wish to assign tasks to a subcontractor, dispatch them to different customers jobs and manage their work separately, you can go about this by adding the subcontractor as an employee. Managing sub-contractors as employees provides the most complete solution. You can restrict the privileges for this employee to be very limited, allow them to view only their own tickets, etc. so they will be able to login to the system (even via the Web Interface only) and see their jobs.

Please note that managing sub-contractors as Employees takes up an Active Employee License for each active subcontractor.

The benefits of managing your sub-contractors as employees are as follows:

1. Your sub-contractors can log their own work in the system. This includes Charges, History Notes, Appointments, Tasks, etc.
2. Generating different CommitCRM Reports that monitor your sub-contractors work statistics; such as Time reports, Charge reports and Activity reports.
3. Recycling Active Employee Licenses to make room for new sub-contractors, once older sub-contractors aren’t receiving work from you.
4. Limiting your subcontractor to only be able to log into the Commit Web Interface for Employees.

Note: The current users restrictions (via File > Users & Privileges) allow you to restrict employees from accessing the complete account list, so they won't be able to see all the account details, however, they will be able to see the account list (without details) when they open a ticket, and select the account to be linked to the ticket, so you should consider whether this solution fits your needs. You can find more information and suggestions on this topic in this link (see questions #1 and #6).

As Customer Web Users

The Second option is letting sub-contractors access the system using Commit Web Interface for Customers. Customers’ Web users in CommitCRM can create new tickets, and update existing tickets; however, when using this method, you’ll need to create a new set of customer Web user credentials for each customer account that you want your subcontractor to have access to.

Using this method is less ideal than managing your subcontractor as an employee, since the subcontractor will not be able to resolve tasks or appointments; however, this method does allow for new history notes to be created, and does not require the use of an Active Employee License, so you can keep as many active sub-contractors as you like.

You can let your sub-contractors open the tickets and update the status by using history notes; however, it will be your responsibility to actually close the ticket when appropriate, which is not a bad idea since most sub-contractors work is kept under supervision by the business that he is working for. Since your subcontractor will need to log in to the system with different credentials for each customer account he uses, making this a less flexible option. However, using this method, you can be sure that your customers see everything logged by the subcontractor.

Once the subcontractor has completed his work at a customers site, you will be able to easily convert the history notes entered by the subcontractor into a charge to bill the customer by opening the history note > Clicking Go Advanced > More Actions > New Labor Charge from History Note. This way, all the logged information in the history note gets copied to the new charge that has been created.

See Also

Logging sub-contractors Work