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Guidelines for Setting Up Field Service Contractors
If you run a field service operation, it’s likely that you work with contractors in addition to your full-time employees. Learn how to incorporate contractors into your field service processes.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic (not available in all orgs) and Lightning Experience |
| The Field Service core features, managed package, and mobile app are available in Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. |
Get Set Up
The way you track contract work in Salesforce depends on how you want to track capacity, assign appointments, and exchange data with contractors. Follow these basic steps to add contractors.
- Create an account and contacts
- Create an account that represents the contractor such as Solar Installation Contracting. Then create contacts linked to the account. Create at least one contact for the contractor manager. If other contractors need access to Experience Builder sites, create contacts for each user.
- Choose licenses
- For contractors who work regularly, our per-user-per-month Contractor and Contractor Plus licenses give them unlimited access to everything they need. If your company employs a large number of seasonal or temporary contractors, our Contractor and Contractor Plus Login-Based licenses are a cost-effective alternative. You can create up to 20 users for each login that you buy with the Contractor and Contractor Plus Login-Based licenses. This multiplier ensures that you have all your contractors set up in the system, even if they don’t work frequently. If you know you need 100 logins, for example, our login-based licenses let you create 2,000 users. Our servers keep each login valid until midnight in most time zones, so workers can get multiple jobs done using a single login.
- Set up access and permissions
- Depending on the licenses that your organization purchased, you can assign contractors the Customer Community Plus or Partner Community license. If both license types are available, partner licenses are ideal for users who are engaged in sales or distribution with your company. Community licenses are required to access Experience Cloud sites.
- If you purchase login-based licenses, each unit of the Contractor Login-Based SKU assigns 20 Customer Community Plus login-based licenses and each unit of the Contractor Plus Login-Based SKU assigns the 20 Partner Community login-based licenses.
- Assign the Field Service Scheduling permission set license so that the user can be included
in scheduling. Assign the Field Service Mobile permission set license to users that need
access to the Field Service mobile app. Then, create a user profile for contractors
(recommended) and configure their object permissions.
Note To customize contractors’ mobile app experience, assign a unique mobile settings configuration—accessible from the Field Service Mobile Settings page in Setup—to the contractor user profile. - Create service resources and service territories
- You can create service resources for every contractor worker or just for the contractor manager. Each service resource is linked to a user—in this case, the contractors at your partner organization.
- Create a service territory for each contractor company, and add the contractor service resources as service territory members. Creating a contractor-specific territory lets the contractor manager see only their employees in the dispatcher console. For example, if you’re contracting with Ursa Major Solar, create a territory named Ursa Major Solar Contracting.
- Provide access to the dispatcher console
- To let the manager dispatch appointments, add the dispatcher console to your Experience Builder site. For help, see Add the Field Service Dispatcher Console to an Experience Builder Site.
Assign Service Appointments to Contractors
Ready to assign a work order to your contractor team? You’ve got options! Here are two common approaches to assigning work to contractors.
- Contractors are service resources
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In this example, the contract manager is an Experience Cloud site user but not a service resource. The contracting mobile workers are service resources with Field Service Mobile licenses.
This approach is best for you if it’s important for the scheduling engine to consider each worker’s schedule when making assignments. And you want contractor workers to view and update appointment details in the field, so you store individual worker details in Salesforce.
In this model, your process looks like this:
- The dispatcher shares the work order with the contractor manager.
- In your site, the contractor manager uses the Book Appointment action to assign the associated service appointment to a mobile worker.
- The mobile worker uses the mobile app. They can view their assignments and update the service appointment and work order status when the work is complete.
- Contractor managers are service resources
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In this example, the contractor manager is an Experience Cloud site user and a service resource. But the contractor manager tracks individual contracting mobile workers in a separate system.
This approach works best when you don’t want to track individual worker details in Salesforce. The contractor manager is responsible for viewing and updating appointment details in the field. And you don’t need the scheduling engine to assign work based on different schedules for each contractor worker.
When you use this model, your process looks like this:
- The dispatcher assigns the service appointment to the contractor manager using their service resource record.
- The contractor coordinates with the contractor team to complete the work.
- After the service appointment is completed, the contractor updates the service appointment and work order status from your site.
