Employees or subcontractors, what is the difference?

With Okappy’s unique market network, you can invite your subcontractors to join you on Okappy, send them jobs and see the status of those jobs as they’re updated in real-time.

But, when should you set someone up as an employee and when should you set them up as a subcontractor?

When adding connections on Okappy, you can add a customer, a subcontractor and an employee.  Both customers and subcontractors are classed as companies on Okappy and can have one or more employees.  That is the key difference and impacts how various functionality works.

Read on to understand the key differences between a subcontractor or employee.

• You can assign jobs to employees or subcontractors
• Employees will receive an alert advising that a job has been assigned to them
• Your employee will be able to see who the customer is. You’re subcontractor cannot see who your customer is
• As a subcontractor is a company, the job will not be automatically assigned to a particular employee of that company
• All administrators at the subcontractor will receive an alert (unless disabled by their settings) advising that the job has been added
• All administrators at the subcontractor can view the jobs assigned to them on their computer, tablet or mobile
• The subcontractor can assign the job to their employee, or even assign it to another subcontractor
• For the same reason that your subcontractor cannot see who your customer is, you cannot see who your subcontract has assigned the job to.
• Once a subcontractor has started work on a job, it cannot be re-assigned to another subcontractor or cancelled.
• Subcontractors cannot see the job history for your customer or see historical jobs done by your employees or other subcontractors
• Jobs which you archive will still be available to your subcontractor. They will need to authorise the job as well once they have finished with it

• Daily checksheets are only available for your own employees
• Custom checksheets are only available for your own employees

• Your subcontractors can raise invoices to you and you can pay your subcontractors via Okappy
• Employees cannot raise invoices to you

• You can create notes on Okappy. These are internal to your company. They can be viewed by your employees but not subcontractors
• Likewise, your subcontractor can add notes for themselves but you would not be able to see them

• You can view the latest locations of your employees and configure tracking
• As a subcontractor is a company, you cannot see the location of their employees in the radar view
• You can view the time and location of each job update whether update by your employee or subcontractor

• You can send internal messages to your employees, as a subcontractor is a company you cannot send an internal message to them although you can send text messages if you a phone number set up for them

• You can set up an employee as a standard user or an administrator.  Standard users can only see their jobs, administrators can see all jobs
• See our support page – user types for more information
• A subcontractor adds their own employees and sets their individual  access levels
• You can set and change passwords for your employees
• Subcontractors set their own passwords

• Employees are billed per employee per month.
• There is no charge for subcontractors, likewise your subcontractor does not have to pay unless they start using Okappy to manage their own business
• Check out our pricing page for more information