With Passport365, we've made it easy to assign jobs to internal fieldworkers or to make use of external contractors. You can create contractors, allocate work and report on jobs by who they have been assigned, whether internal or external.

The scheduler also separates out those tasks assigned to external contractors making it simple to see, at a glance, where work has been allocated, to whom and when it has been scheduled.

To start using contractors in the Passport365 app you will need to create a contact record. You can use our help files on 'How to add a contractor or supplier' to set up a new contractor.

You can use Passport365 to define custom contact categories with which to group your contractors. You could choose to this to identify only those contractors who have specialist skills, access (such as to work on an MOD site) or to create a group of contractors who can speak Spanish; the choice is yours.

See our help files on 'How to create contact categories' for further information on how to set up categories for your contractors.
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Assigning Jobs to an External Contractor

Assigning a job to an external contractor is similar to assigning a job to your own internal fieldworkers. However, because they do not have access to your Passport365 system they will be unable to update progress on any job so this won't be reflected in your job timeline or the scheduling part of the system.

To assign a job to your contractor, navigate to the 'Jobs' section using the left hand menu pane and select the job you wish to allocate:

In the same way as assigning and scheduling a job for your internal fieldworkers, select 'Edit Job':

At the very bottom of the job page you will find the section on allocating where you can choose between 'Internal workforce' or 'Contractor':
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Select 'Contractor' and you can select from a contractor instead of a member of your own staff. If you have defined and assigned contact categories then you can use this to filter your selection of contractors to choose from or select a contractor directly:

As you are unable to view their schedule directly and choose from a selection of available dates generated by availability through the Passport365 scheduler, you must select a fixed date and time for the works. 

Once you have chosen a date, select 'Save' to assign the job to your contractor. 

Selecting 'Save' will launch a pop-up window allowing you to select what information is generated on the job sheet. This is set up to send a job sheet to the customer but you can use this to generate a job sheet for your contractor:

Don't forget that for internal confidentiality you can select whether to include price and cost information with this job sheet by toggling the radials under 'Cost Items':

Once you select 'Save and send', the updated information will be reflected in the saved job and show up in the scheduler: