Managing Subcontractors in Field Service Without Losing Control

At some point, every growing field service company faces the same question: do we hire another tech, or do we bring on a subcontractor? Subcontractors let you scale capacity without the commitment of a full-time employee. They cover overflow work, specialist jobs, and geographic areas you can’t service efficiently with your own team.

The problem is control. When your own tech completes a job, you control the process, the quality, and the customer experience. When a subcontractor completes a job under your brand, the customer doesn’t know or care that it was a sub. If the work is poor, the follow-up is slow, or the compliance paperwork is missing, your reputation takes the hit — not the subcontractor’s.

Managing subcontractors well means treating them as an extension of your operation, not as an afterthought. That requires systems — for scheduling, compliance, quality, and payment — that most field service companies don’t have until they’ve already been burned.

Scheduling Subcontractors

The first operational challenge is getting the right job to the right sub at the right time. This sounds simple. In practice, it’s a coordination headache that grows exponentially with the number of subs you use.

Visibility into availability. Your own techs have schedules you control. Subcontractors have their own workload from other clients. You need to know who’s available before you can assign work — and “available” means both free and willing to take the job. Some subs work with you three days a week. Some only take overflow when they have gaps. Some only cover certain areas or job types.

Job assignment workflow. How does a sub get a job? If it’s a phone call from your dispatcher, you’ve got a verbal agreement with no paper trail. If it’s an email with a job sheet attached, you’ve got a paper trail but no confirmation of acceptance. The sub should receive the job through a defined channel — ideally the same system your own techs use — with a clear accept/decline mechanism and all the job details they need.

Customer experience continuity. The customer booked with your company. They should receive the same appointment confirmation, the same ETA updates, and the same follow-up communication regardless of whether the job is completed by your tech or a sub. If your customer communication only works for internal techs, subs create a gap in the experience.

Compliance Verification

This is where subcontractor management gets serious. You are responsible for ensuring that anyone working under your business name is properly licensed, insured, and compliant with safety requirements. If a subcontractor’s public liability insurance has lapsed and they cause damage on a job, you’re exposed.

At minimum, you need to track and verify:

• Licences and certifications. Trade licences, specialist certifications, working-at-heights tickets, confined-space accreditation — whatever your work requires. Copies on file, with expiry dates tracked.
• Insurance. Public liability, professional indemnity, workers’ compensation (or personal accident cover for sole traders). Current certificates of currency, updated annually at minimum.
• Safety documentation. Their own Safe Work Method Statements, induction records for your sites, and evidence of safety training relevant to the work they’re performing.
• ABN and tax declarations. A valid ABN and a completed Taxable Payments Annual Report declaration if you’re paying them more than $750 in a financial year for building and construction services.

The challenge is that this documentation changes. Insurance policies renew annually. Certifications expire at different intervals. A sub who was fully compliant six months ago might have gaps today. You need a system that tracks expiry dates across all your active subs and flags upcoming lapses with enough lead time to request updated documents — or stop assigning work until they’re current.

Quality Control

Quality is the hardest thing to maintain with subcontractors because you’re not on site watching the work. Your reputation depends on their performance, but you don’t have direct supervision.

Standardised job completion requirements. Define what “completed” means for each job type. Not just “the work is done” — but photos of the completed work, a filled-out checklist, customer sign-off, and any mandatory compliance documentation. If your internal techs are required to submit these, your subs should be too. Same standard, no exceptions.

Customer feedback loops. Send the same post-job satisfaction survey for sub-completed work as you do for internal work. If a sub’s customer satisfaction scores are consistently lower, you have a data-driven conversation to have — rather than only finding out about problems when customers complain.

Spot audits. Periodically review subcontractor work. This might mean sending a senior tech to inspect completed jobs, reviewing photos and documentation for completeness, or calling customers after sub-completed jobs to check they’re satisfied. You don’t need to audit every job — a random 10-15% sample gives you enough signal to identify patterns.

Payment Tracking

Subcontractor payments are deceptively complex. Unlike payroll — which is consistent, regular, and largely automated — sub payments vary by job, by rate agreement, and by payment terms. Without a clean system, you end up in a tangle of invoices, purchase orders, and disputes.

Rate agreements. Define rates upfront in a written agreement — not a handshake. Hourly rates, fixed rates per job type, call-out fees, after-hours loadings. Document them. When a payment dispute arises (and they will), you need a reference point that both parties agreed to.

Job-based tracking. Every payment should tie back to a completed and verified job. The sub completes the work, submits their completion evidence (photos, checklist, customer sign-off), your team verifies it, and the job is approved for payment. No job verification, no payment approval. This protects both parties and creates a clear audit trail.

Reconciliation. At the end of each pay period, you should be able to generate a statement for each sub showing every job completed, the agreed rate for each, any adjustments, and the total payable. The sub should be able to verify this against their own records. Discrepancies get resolved before payment is processed — not three months later when someone reviews the books.

Maintaining Your Service Standards

The fundamental tension with subcontractors is that they’re independent operators working under your brand. You can’t manage them like employees — and legally, you shouldn’t, or you risk a sham contracting determination. But you can set clear expectations and build systems that make compliance with those expectations the path of least resistance.

Onboarding process. Every new sub goes through a defined onboarding — not just paperwork collection, but a genuine introduction to how your company operates. Your quality standards, your customer communication expectations, your safety requirements, your job completion process. Make it clear what “working with us” means in practice.

Performance visibility. Track key metrics per subcontractor: jobs completed, first-time fix rate, customer satisfaction scores, completion time, compliance documentation submission rate. Review quarterly. Share the data with your subs — the good performers appreciate recognition, and underperformers either lift their game or self-select out.

Preferred sub tiers. Not all subcontractors are equal. Build a tiered system — preferred subs who’ve proven their reliability get first access to work. New or inconsistent subs get less work until they’ve established a track record. This creates a natural incentive to meet your standards without you having to micromanage.

Where to Start

If you’re using subcontractors today with no formal system, start with the risk.

Compliance first. Collect and verify every active sub’s insurance, licences, and certifications. Build a register with expiry dates. Set calendar reminders for 30 days before each expiry. This is the minimum — and it protects you from the worst-case scenario.

Then standardise job assignment. Move from phone calls and texts to a documented process — even if it’s just a standard email template with job details and an explicit acceptance requirement. The paper trail matters.

Then tackle quality. Define your completion requirements and start requiring subs to meet them. Photos, checklists, customer sign-off. Start with your highest-volume sub and expand from there.

Finally, systematise payments. Tie every payment to a verified job. Build a reconciliation process that catches discrepancies before they become disputes.

Subcontractors are a powerful growth lever for field service companies. The ones that manage them well get flexible capacity, geographic reach, and specialist skills without the overhead of full-time hires. The ones that don’t end up with compliance exposure, inconsistent quality, and payment disputes that consume far more management time than the subs save in labour.