What you owe each subcontractor

A subcontractor’s hours are approved on Timesheets at the cost rate their record carries. Payments to them are expenses tagged to them, which the tax summary already adds up for the 1099.

The product held both halves of what do I owe Sam and never put them on one line. This is that line.

Read the view

Subcontractor pay on the Timesheets page shows, for a pay period, each subcontractor with:

• Earned — their approved hours and what those come to at the cost rate recorded on each entry, and with Commissions & pay rules added, their commissions and tips, which the row names.
• Paid — the expenses recorded against them in the period.
• Balance — the difference, carried across periods.

The periods are your business’s pay period, which is Timesheets’ setting. Subcontractor pay’s own page shows it under Works with, and the owner can change it there or on Timesheets’ page — it is one setting either way. See Set your pay period.

The view is there while your business has Subcontractor pay, one of the tools the owner adds on the Tools page. Remove it and the Timesheets page shows the timesheets alone; every payment you recorded is kept, and adding it back brings the view back as it was.

Know what counts as earned

Only approved hours count. Hours not yet approved are shown as pending and are not in the figure.

That is deliberate: the number is what a manager signed off, not what somebody typed in. An amount you are about to pay somebody should not move because a time entry was edited overnight.

The rate is the one each entry carried when it was logged — so changing a subcontractor’s rate today does not silently revalue three weeks of work you already agreed. See Time tracking.

Commissions and tips count when the customer pays. With Commissions & pay rules added, a subcontractor’s commissions and tips are in Earned on the day the payment came in — or the day a refund or a void took some back — whatever the state of their hours, because the money was collected either way. They carry into the balance like the hours do, Record payment fills in the amount with them, and the export adds commission and tips columns. See See commissions and tips beside the hours, and Commissions and pay rules for how they are earned.

Record a payment

Record payment on a subcontractor’s row opens the expense form already filled in: the balance they are owed (blank when nothing is), the subcontractor, the Contract Labor category, their business name (or their own name, without one) as the vendor, today’s date and a description naming the period. Change anything before you save. It is offered to people whose role can record spending, because the payment is an expense.

The saved expense is the payment, the same record the tax summary reads, so the balance and the 1099 totals move together.

There is no second ledger to keep in step, because there is no second ledger.

Understand the balance carrying forward

An unpaid week is still owed next month. The balance runs across periods rather than resetting, which is the only behavior that matches how these arrangements actually work.

At tax time

What you paid each subcontractor across the year, and whether they crossed the 1099 reporting threshold, is on Tax reporting.

Tax IDs are deliberately not stored anywhere in this product.