Subcontractors and crews

What Labor Manager is

Labor Manager, under Production in the sidebar, is where the crews who do the physical work get set up: the subcontractor companies you use, the crews under each one, and who leads each crew. It's the record-keeping side of labor; putting a crew on a specific job's schedule happens from the project and order, not from here.

What a subcontractor record holds

A subcontractor record is one labor company: its name, address, email, phone and a contact name. Creating one also creates a sign-in for its owner, the primary contact, invited by email with the Subcontractor role, so that person can log in directly rather than working entirely through your office. A subcontractor's detail page also tracks its job history: how many projects it has worked, how far out it's booked, when it last worked a job, and a full list of its past and upcoming labor and delivery events.

What a crew record holds

A crew always belongs to one subcontractor. Each crew has a name, a crew lead, an availability status (Available or Unavailable), the trades it works (from your account's own trade list), and a color used to tell crews apart on the calendar. A crew lead is a real sign-in, not just a name on the record: creating a crew either picks an existing crew lead or invites a new one by email with the Crew Lead role, the same way a subcontractor's owner is invited.

Creating a subcontractor and its crews

1. From Labor Manager, add a new subcontractor with its company details and its owner's name, email and phone; the invite email goes out automatically.
2. Open the subcontractor and add a crew: name it, set its trades and color, and either choose an existing crew lead or invite a new one.
3. Repeat for as many crews as that subcontractor runs.

How labor attaches to a project

A project doesn't get labor directly; labor is scheduled against one of the project's orders, and that scheduling is what creates the link to a crew. Once a project has at least one crew or delivery scheduled against it, a Labor tab appears on the project, listing every crew scheduled against it with the labor line items and dates for each one. A subcontractor's job history, on its own detail page, is the same data seen from the other side: every project any of its crews has been scheduled on.

What the Subcontractor and Crew Lead roles can see

Both roles are meant to sign in and see only their own work. In the CRM, a Subcontractor or Crew Lead can only open a project if their subcontractor is directly assigned to it or one of their crews has a labor event scheduled on it; a Crew Lead's access narrows further, to just the crews they personally lead, while a Subcontractor sees anything tied to any of their company's crews. On the calendar, both roles can see crew events but can't create, edit or delete them.

Who can do this

By default, four roles, Account Admin, Back Office, Subcontractor and Crew Lead, can all list, view, create and edit both subcontractor and crew records: View, Create and Modify on Subcontractor, and the matching View, Create and Modify on Crew. The exceptions are deletion: only Account Admin can delete a crew (Delete on Crew), and by default no role can delete a subcontractor record at all; an account admin can grant that individually from the Permissions screen if it's ever needed.

---