External workers

An external worker is someone who does jobs for you but isn’t on your payroll: a contractor firm’s engineer, a subcontractor crew, a friend covering a busy fortnight. You give them access to the jobs you assign them. Their login stays theirs, or their employer’s, and you don’t create or manage it.

Once they accept, they appear on your resources board like anyone else, so you assign and schedule them the same way. Work with subcontractors takes one engagement from invitation to finish.

Team member or external worker?

The difference isn’t the kind of work. It’s who owns the login.

	Team member	External worker
Login owned by	Your organisation, under your sign-in policy	Them, or their employer
Sees	Whatever their role allows	The jobs you assign them
Access ends when	You remove them	The access date passes, you remove them, or their employer closes their account

Inviting one

Open Settings > Team Members and click Invite external worker.

Enter their email address, then answer the question the dialog leads with: is the arrangement with the person, or with their company?

With this person suits a freelancer or someone helping out. They connect with an email address they own, such as a personal one. Only you or they can end that access.

With their company suits a contractor firm sending you one of their engineers. They connect with their work login. Company name then becomes required, and it shows next to their name in your members list so you can see at a glance who came from where.

Company arrangements end with the job

When someone connects through their employer’s login, your access to them depends on that employer. If they leave, their sign-in stops working and WorkWing stops you assigning them new work, without warning you first. That’s the point of the arrangement: you’re not chasing a contractor firm to find out who still works there.

Then set the rest:

• Brand, which is the one brand they’ll work under.
• Access ends, a date. WorkWing suggests 30 days out, and the calendar won’t take a date more than a year ahead.
• Require two-factor authentication, off by default. Turn it on and they must have two-factor set up before they can enter your workspace. It applies to this connection only. It doesn’t change anything for the rest of your team, and it doesn’t follow them to another organisation they work with.

The dialog shows how many external seats you’ve used. If they’re all gone you can still send the invitation, but nobody can accept it until a seat frees up or you change plan.

Accepting

They get an email with a link. Opening it asks for their email address, sends a six-digit code, and lets them accept once they enter it. There’s no password to set up unless they already have one.

WorkWing then creates their resource record and their access to that brand in one step. You don’t have to add them to the resources board yourself.

What they can see

The jobs you’ve assigned them, and what they need to work those jobs: the job type’s form, the customer on that job, and the parts they use. They can also report something they notice on site.

That’s the whole surface. No customer list, no jobs that aren’t theirs, no customer notes, no reports, no settings, and they can’t connect an AI assistant to your workspace. When their access ends they stop seeing all of it, and everything they did stays in your records.

Ending or extending access

Access lapses on the date you set. To carry on past it, send a fresh invitation with a new end date and have them accept; their record and history carry straight over.

To end it sooner, open Settings > Team Members, find their row and choose Remove Member. An invitation nobody has accepted yet can be revoked from the pending list on the same page.

When someone can no longer sign in

Access can stop for reasons that have nothing to do with you: their employer closed the account, they deleted it, the date passed. Whatever the cause, WorkWing does the same three things.

• It blocks new assignments to them, wherever an assignment could be made.
• It badges them Can’t sign in in your members list.
• It lists their open jobs on your dashboard under Needs reassignment, so you know what to move.

What you’re told is that they can’t sign in. The reason belongs to them and, where it applies, their employer.

Workers who serve several organisations

Plenty of contractors work for more than one WorkWing customer, and one login covers all of them. They switch between the organisations they serve inside the app, and each one shows them only its own jobs.

What that means for you: the notes, skills, tags and job history you record about a worker are yours, your sign-in requirements are checked every time they enter your workspace regardless of where else they work, and what you see about them is what happened on your jobs.

Availability

An external worker’s availability is told to you, not detected.

They can mark themselves away from Account > Profile, which applies at every organisation they work for. You’ll see it as time off on their record and in the assignment picker, exactly as if you’d recorded it. You can also record time off for them yourself, like any other resource. See Availability and location.

Seats

External workers come out of a seat pool of their own, so taking on a contractor for a fortnight doesn’t cost you a staff seat.

Plan	External seats
Free	None
Basic	125
Standard	250
Professional	500

On the paid plans that number is a fair-use ceiling rather than a target, set well above what a normal team uses, and support will raise it for you if you’re close. Your usage is on the Billing page.

Two things people ask

Can I turn an external worker into a team member? Yes. Invite them as a colleague from the same Team Members screen. Their history as an external worker stays where it is.

Can a contractor firm manage its own crew for us? Each worker connects individually. To work with a firm’s people as a set, give them a shared tag or put them in a team.