Contractors and Billing

A Contractor is a company working on your site whose people take items from your machines. Each employee has a Billing setting:

• Billing: Organization — the employee’s vends are your organization’s own consumption. This is every employee’s billing unless you choose otherwise.
• Billing: Contractor — the employee’s vends are billed to the contractor you pick, so you can report them separately and re-charge the contractor.

Billing is recorded on every vend at the moment it happens. A vend keeps the billing it was made under, so moving an employee to another contractor next month does not change last month’s reports unless you deliberately choose to (see Change an employee’s billing).

Billing is independent of how the person gets access. A contractor’s people can be regular employees with the app or a key card, or temporary access holders — either way, their billing is whatever you set on the employee. Employees never see their billing, and they cannot choose it at the machine.

Manage contractors

Open the Contractors page from the menu. It lists your contractors with:

• Name and Reference — the reference is optional; use it for your own code for the contractor, such as a supplier or purchase-order number.
• Active employees — how many employees are currently billed to the contractor. When some employees who are no longer active are still linked to it, the extra count is shown next to it as +N archived/expired.
• Status — archived contractors are marked Archived.

Create or edit a contractor

1. On the Contractors page, click Create Contractor.
2. Enter the Name and, optionally, a Reference.
3. Click Create.

To rename a contractor or change its reference, click Edit on its row and Save. Reports show a contractor’s current name, including for vends made before it was renamed.

Names must be unique among your active contractors, and so must references, when you give one. The check ignores capital letters, so Acme Electrical and ACME ELECTRICAL count as the same name.

The Employees button on a row opens the Employee Management page filtered to that contractor.

Archive and restore a contractor

Archive a contractor when it no longer works on your site. Click Archive on its row and confirm.

• An archived contractor can no longer be chosen for an employee, for temporary access, in an import or when correcting a vend.
• Its past vends keep its name in every report, and you can still pick it in the transaction filters, where it is labelled (archived).

Archiving is refused while any active employee is still billed to the contractor, and the message tells you how many. Change those employees’ billing first. Disabled employees still count as active here. Employees who have been removed from your roster and temporary access that has already expired do not block archiving.

To bring a contractor back, turn on Show archived and click Restore on its row. It keeps its history and can be assigned again. Restoring is refused if another active contractor now uses the same name or reference.

Set billing for a new employee

When you add an employee, the Billing field defaults to Organization. Choose Contractor and pick the contractor to bill their vends to that contractor from their very first vend. Only active contractors are offered.

You can also set billing when you grant temporary access and in a CSV import (the contractor column).

Editing an employee’s details never changes their billing — use Change billing instead.

Change an employee’s billing

1. Open the employee from the Employee Management page with Edit Employee.
2. Next to Billing, click Change billing.
3. In Bill to, choose Organization or a contractor.
4. In Applies from, choose when the change takes effect (see below).
5. Click Preview. Check what will move before you continue.
6. Click Confirm change. The dialog reports how many vends moved and their value.

Applies from

For any option other than Now, the preview lists the vends and their value that will move, split by what they are billed to today and by month. The totals in the preview are exactly what Confirm change moves.

A past date rewrites history. Every vend the employee made from that date on is moved to the new billing, whatever it was billed to before. That includes months you have already re-charged to a contractor, and vends you corrected one by one. Reports you produced before the change will no longer match reports you run after it, and an invoice you already sent may now be wrong. Read the preview month by month before you confirm, and if a month has already been invoiced, choose a date after it.

Only billing moves. Quantities, values, stock, job IDs and the vends themselves are never changed, and the employee’s other details are untouched. Every billing change is recorded in the audit log with who made it, the employee, the old and new billing, the applies-from date and how many vends (and how much value) moved.

Correct the billing of a single vend

When one vend was billed to the wrong place — for example, a contractor’s employee took an item for your own maintenance team — correct just that vend:

1. On the Transaction Records page, find the vend.
2. Click the pencil button (Correct billing) next to the vend’s Billing value. Only Admins see it.
3. In Bill to, choose Organization or an active contractor, and click Save.

Only that vend changes. The employee’s billing and their other vends stay as they are. Each correction is recorded in the audit log.

Who can do what

Users with only the Report role cannot manage contractors or billing, but can choose any contractor, including archived ones, in the Billing filter on the Transaction Records page.

An Employee Management user sees the past options in Change billing but cannot select them. An organization API token can do what its service account’s role allows, except that it can never move past vends or correct a single vend, even when its service account has the Admin role — changing the billing of vends already made is always done by a person in the admin portal.

How vend value is calculated

Reports, exports and value-based group limits all use the same definition of a vend’s value:

Vend value = the product’s unit value recorded at the time of the vend × the quantity.

From this release, each vend records the Product Value as it stood when the item was dispensed. Changing a product’s value later does not change the value of vends already made.

There are two exceptions, where Industrial Vending has no recorded value and uses the product’s current value × the quantity instead:

• Vends made before this release. Values were not recorded before contractor billing was introduced, and older vends are not filled in afterwards. They keep following the product’s current value — permanently.
• Vends of a product that had no value set at the time. If you add a value to the product later, those vends take on the new value.

If you re-charge contractors by value, set your product values before the vends happen. A value entered afterwards is applied to every earlier vend of that product that had no value, and a vend recorded at a value is never re-valued.

The vend value is what the Value column on the Transaction Records page, the transaction CSV, the Contractor aggregation, the billing-change preview and employee group value limits use.

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