Maintenance Contractors
The Contractors tab is the list of outside firms you use for maintenance, with what each of them does and what they charge. A contractor is a supplier — this tab adds the maintenance facts about them on top of the supplier record, so their invoices, payments and ageing stay where the rest of your purchasing lives.
A contractor entry
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Code | Your own short identifier, for example HVAC-01. |
| Contractor | The supplier record they invoice from. |
| Specialization | What they do — Air conditioning, Electrical, Lifts. |
| Hourly Rate | Their agreed rate, for estimating. |
| Inactive | Retires them without losing the history of what they did. |
Why the supplier link matters
Because a contractor points at a supplier, everything downstream is ordinary ERP:
- Their bills are supplier invoices, ageing and paying like any other.
- They appear in supplier reports, statements and payment runs without a separate process.
- Linking an invoice accounts already entered works, because it is the same invoice.
A firm you only ever buy parts from does not need a contractor entry. Add one when they do work you want to raise jobs against.
The hourly rate
The rate here is for estimating a job before the work happens. What they actually charged comes from their bill, and that is what the cost reports use. A large gap between the two on the same contractor, repeatedly, is worth a conversation.
Internal or external
A job's Maintenance Type decides which list you assign from: Internal Team assigns to an HRM employee, External Contractor assigns to a contractor from this list. Set it before assigning, or the list you want will not be the one offered.
Retire contractors by marking them inactive rather than deleting them. Jobs, service history and bills from years back all reference the contractor record, and the cost-by-asset report reads much better when it can still name who did the work.