Contractors

The contractor register is the org-wide master list of every trade, sub-contractor, and supplier your team works with. Add a contractor once, and they're available across every project in the organisation — for assigning defects, raising work orders, and tracking insurance.

What's on a contractor

Each contractor record holds:

→Name — the company name (required).
→Email and phone — top-level company contacts.
→Insurance expiry — when their public liability or other certificate lapses. The dashboard flags upcoming expiries so you don't engage a contractor whose cover has run out.
→Checklist — a free-form list of compliance items the contractor needs to complete (e.g. inductions, safety certificates, contract signing).

Contractors are organisation-scoped, not project-scoped. The same contractor record carries across every project they work on.

Multiple contacts per contractor

A contractor company often has multiple people you deal with — a director for contracts, a foreman for site queries, a back-office contact for invoicing. Each contractor record supports multiple named contacts:

→Name (required) and email, phone, trade (e.g. "Site supervisor", "Accounts").
→One contact can be marked as the default — the one that gets the first notification when work is assigned.

Internal notes

Each user can add private notes against a contractor. Notes are scoped to the author and the organisation — they're visible to the team but tied to who wrote them. Use them for:

→Job history ("Did the basement waterproofing on Project X — solid work, slow on remedials").
→Issues to watch ("Always confirm material delivery dates in writing").
→Internal preference notes that don't belong in a formal record.

Notes don't flow to the contractor — they're internal context for your team only.

Merging duplicates

If the same contractor gets added twice (e.g. once as "ABC Plumbing" and once as "ABC Plumbing Pty Ltd"), you can merge them:

→Pick the primary record (the one you want to keep).
→All defect assignments, work orders, contacts, and notes from the duplicate are reassigned to the primary.
→The merge is recorded with counts (how many contacts, notes, assignments moved) and the user who performed it.
→The duplicate is soft-deleted, not erased — the audit trail of who did what before the merge stays intact.

Merging is non-destructive. If you merge the wrong way, you can re-create the original and reassign — but it's better to be deliberate the first time.

Soft delete

Contractors aren't hard-deleted from the system. When you remove a contractor, they're flagged inactive — historical records (assignments, work orders, distributions) keep referencing the same contractor name, so reports from prior periods still read correctly.