Since the dawn of time, contractors have used subcontractors to help them with their work. Whether it’s for specialty trade items, or for the entire job itself, subs are vital to the health of the construction, industry as a whole.
But while JobNimbus has allowed you to track your subcontractors up to this point, there was still so much more we could do to improve sub tracking, communication, assignments, and more.
Without further ado, we’re announcing a new way to track your subs.
Subcontractors Are Now 1st Class Citizens in JobNimbus
Previously, the way you’d add a subcontractor into JobNimbus was by creating a normal contact and checking a box for “subcontractor”. That checkbox would be the only thing telling us or you that this was a sub. Further, the only thing you could do with your subs was assign tasks, but that utility was about it.
In v1.28, we’ve given subcontractors the royal treatment and added some much-awaited enhancements that we’re sure you’ll love:
Subcontractors now use Contact Workflows
Instead of a checkbox-based control, we went all out and added the ability for you to create full workflows for your subs. Now when you want to manage your sub workflows, you just go into the Contact Workflows tab of your Settings and you add, edit, hide, or delete just like you would with any other contact type.
Why is this so awesome? Because…
…Subcontractors now have customizable Types and Statuses
Not only does this give you a more obvious way to manage your subs, but it also means your subcontractors can now be classified by Contact Type. That means you can assign your painters to a “Painter” type, and your drywall guys in a “Drywall” type.
The real power of this comes when you can pull up a report and see every single one of your subs by what they do and their corresponding status.
Subs can now be assigned Contacts, Jobs, and Work Orders
Previously, subs could only be assigned tasks. This made things difficult because often a task needed to be accompanied by job information, such as the address or phone number for a homeowner. You would have to push more info to your sub for them to have enough to go off of, and then it wasn’t an optimal experience for either party.
Further, if you had a sub assigned a task, but not assigned the job or contact, you might still be out of the loop as to which sub you assigned unless you clicked all the way in and down to see the task assignee.
Even more than that, a lot of you send out your work via work orders instead of tasks, so sub tracking was completely useless before.
But with this new update you’re able to assign out every part of the process, starting with the Contact, then the Job (if you have Jobs enabled), and then the individual Work Orders that they will need to complete, in addition to Tasks.
This lets you leave nothing behind so that your subs know what to do and who to contact, and you know which subs are assigned to each part of the process.
You can now see your Subs on the calendar
Just like you already do with your regular team members, you can now see all of your subs on your calendar with their corresponding assignments.
When you create a subcontractor workflow in your Settings, you’ll then see a new list on the left side of your calendar labeled “Subcontractors“. This will include a list of all of your subs with checkboxes for you to easily toggle on/off the ones that you want to see.
All of this gives you more control and visibility, while empowering your subs to be able to get more work done with less back-and-forth.
You can even set Team Members as Subs
We’ve taken our sub tracking a step further by not only allowing you to add people from outside JobNimbus, but also to label your own Team Members inside JobNimbus as subs. This gives you full control over how
As an admin, you can set a team member as a sub by going to the Team tab in Settings and using the action menu on each team member to click “Edit“. You’ll see a new checkbox on the Info page labeled “Subcontractor“. Just check that and then hit “Save” at the bottom.
How Can I Start Using It?
Subcontractors is an optional feature in the Features tab of your Settings. To get started just enable the feature in your Settings and then head to the Contact Workflows tab in Settings.
Once there, you can create a new Contact Workflow and check the box for “Subcontractor”. Then, just edit that workflow, save, and start using it!
We’ll have more detailed instructions coming soon so stay tuned.
Also new in v1.28:
Team members can send EV orders
EagleView is often something that admins will be taking care of, but we know there are quite a few of you popping up that are giving this power to your reps and other team members as well. To help you be as efficient as possible, we’ve given permission to your team members to order EagleViews from the web app.
Calendar Improvements
We’ve made some improvements to the calendar in terms of bug fixes and overall usability. We’ll have some big updates coming very soon and will be adding new info to our previous release notes when that happens.
