Dispatching work to a contractor
Raising a survey or works order asks who’s carrying it out: one of your own people, or a contractor organisation. Choosing a contractor sends the job to their side of the platform, not yours.
What it is
Assigning to a contractor is exclusive with assigning to your own surveyor at the point of creation — a job goes to one or the other, never both at once. Once sent, it appears in the contractor’s own Jobs list against their own active grant; their own manager then assigns it to one of their own surveyors or operatives, exactly as you would with your own team. A contractor never sees your property register, your other contractors, or any evidence beyond what’s attached to the jobs you’ve actually sent them.
How to do it
- When raising a survey or works order, choose Send to contractor instead of assigning to your own surveyor, and pick the contractor from your directory.
- Confirm the contractor’s status shows Active before sending — an unclaimed or invited contractor can still receive work, but check their card if anything looks off.
- Watch for an amber or red insurance/accreditation warning on the contractor’s card before dispatching anything time-sensitive — it doesn’t block sending, but it’s worth a second look.
- Track the job exactly as you would one of your own — it appears in your Jobs tab with the contractor’s name against it, and its stage updates as their team works it.
How it integrates
The system re-checks that an active grant genuinely exists for the chosen contractor at the moment a job is created — if a grant was revoked or removed since you last looked, the create fails closed rather than silently binding to a stale relationship. A job assigned to a contractor can still end up with both a contractor organisation and an individual assignee set once their own surveyor claims it — that’s expected, not a data error. Insurance and accreditation expiry warnings live entirely on the Contractors directory (see The contractor directory); dispatch itself is never blocked by an expired credential, since only your organisation’s own judgement should decide whether to proceed.
Common problems
- I can’t find a contractor in the assignment picker. Only contractors with an active grant appear — check their status under Contractors; a suspended contractor is excluded until reactivated.
- The contractor says they never received the job. Confirm the grant is active and check the job’s assignment detail — a grant that was revoked after the job was created can leave it visibly assigned but the relationship no longer live.
- A job is assigned to both a contractor and one of our own surveyors. That’s not possible at creation — it can only happen because the contractor’s own surveyor later claimed a job that was also, separately, still showing your own surveyor from before it was farmed out; check the job’s history.