Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 21

Working with Partners & Suppliers

No service company is an island. Beacon subcontracts overflow work to a two-man shop across town, takes overflow from a bigger outfit in return, and buys parts from three suppliers. BigWave models the work side as partners and the parts side as supplier purchase orders, both living on the same work orders as everything else. That’s the point. Subcontracted work is still your work order, your status flow, your paperwork.

Partner records

Home/Manage/Partners holds the companies you exchange work with. A partner record carries Details, Contacts, Documents for their insurance certificate and your subcontract agreement, the Projects shared with them, their Assignments, their Customers where relevant, and their own Technicians. Partners take custom fields too, defined globally per chapter 10. Insurance Expiration, Trade and Coverage Area are the classic three.

Partner technicians are created on the partner record and then behave like your own for dispatch. Assignable on the resource calendar, visible in My Assignments when they log in, able to capture photos and comments and time in the field per chapter 17. Their access flows through the partner, so they see their assignments and nothing of yours beyond them.

Subcontracting a work order

Handing a job to a partner is chapter 16’s assignment mechanics with a partner tech as the assignee.

  1. The work order exists as usual, in your project, with your statuses.
  2. Assign the partner’s technician, or let the partner’s own office assign one of theirs through their portal, chapter 14.
  3. Turn on assignment confirmation so “sent to partner” and “partner acknowledged” stay distinct facts. The project’s confirmation report tracks the laggards.
  4. The partner tech works the job like any tech. Status forward, photos up, deliverables checked.
  5. Their cost lands as line items on the work order, priced by chapter 11’s markup rules, passthrough or cost plus or whatever the arrangement is, and chapter 19 bills your customer normally.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): two of the twelve inspection sites sit three hours out, so Priya assigns the partner’s techs to those. Harbor Grill sees Beacon paperwork, Beacon statuses and the same signed report deliverable. Who drove is invisible, which is what subcontracting should look like from the customer’s side.

Residential (the Okafors): overflow Saturday calls go to the partner when Beacon’s board is full. Same flow, smaller stakes.

Supplier purchase orders

The Supplier Orders panel on a work order, internal users only, raises purchase orders for parts bought for that specific job: which supplier, which materials, what cost. Because the PO belongs to the work order, three things follow. The job’s true cost includes the bought parts with no month-end matching. The PO’s lines flow into invoicing under their markup rule. And each project’s Supplier Orders report shows open POs across all its work orders.

Suppliers themselves are records, supplier-type contacts, and for companies running inventory they’re part of the fuller purchasing setup on the Inventory side. For most service companies the work-order-level PO is the whole story. Part ordered for the job, received, billed on the job.

Checklist

  1. Create partners as partners, not as oddly named technicians. The record’s documents and custom fields are where insurance tracking lives.
  2. Track insurance expirations in a partner custom field and put a view on it. Expired-cert subcontracting is an uninsured incident waiting for a date.
  3. Confirmation on for every partner assignment, always.
  4. Decide the markup rule per arrangement once, chapter 11, so partner costs price themselves.
  5. Raise supplier POs from the work order that consumes the parts, and the job costing takes care of itself.