Most fabrication firms use subcontractors: a welder for a busy month, an erector for a big install. They invoice for their time. They do not fill in a timesheet, and they are not on the payroll. But their hours are still hours on the job, and a job that leaves them out looks cheaper in hours than it really was.
How it works
- A subcontractor is a person on the Employees screen, marked as a subcontractor, so the office finds them where it looks for everybody else. A filter shows just the subcontractors.
- The office enters their days from each invoice, on the person’s Hours tab: the day, the hours (7.5 or 7:30 both work), the job, fabrication or installation, and the invoice number.
- Those hours count on the job. They are in the Jobs list’s hours and in the job’s audit report, where the person is marked as a subcontractor with hours taken from invoices.
Why their hours live somewhere else
The tempting way to build this is to let subcontractors have timesheets like everybody else, with a flag that says “but don’t pay this one”. We deliberately did not.
A timesheet entry in Costworks rounds, goes for approval, gets banded, gets priced and goes into gross pay. Every one of those steps would need its own “unless it’s a subcontractor” — and the first one forgotten, in some report added a year from now, would put a subcontractor on your payroll.
So subcontractors’ hours are kept in a record of their own. Nothing that pays anybody reads that record. The only things that do are the ones that are meant to: the job’s hours and the job’s audit report. The Timesheets board and the monthly report leave subcontractors out altogether, and so does the payroll CSV.
Kept apart, there is no rule to forget. A report that has never heard of subcontractors simply cannot include them.
No sign-in, by design
A subcontractor cannot be given a sign-in or sent an invitation. Their hours come from their invoice, entered by the office, so there is nothing for them to sign in to — and nobody outside your payroll is holding a password to your firm’s system.
For the same reason, Costworks will not change somebody between subcontractor and employee while they still have a sign-in, shifts on a timesheet or invoiced hours. No row is ever left counting in the wrong place.
