How to Manage Contractors and Freelancers in ClickUp

Have you been looking for the best way to manage contractors and freelancers inside of ClickUp? Well, in today's tutorial, I'm going to be walking you through our exact setup that we use to manage our contractors and freelancers inside of our ClickUp workspace. But before we get started, if you want ClickUp's first ever and highest rated solutions partner to help set up ClickUp for your team, go to zenpilot.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We've helped close to 3,000 different teams streamline their operations in ClickUp, and we'd love to do the same for you. Or if you're not ready for that yet, I highly recommend you download our 56 page how to use ClickUp guide that walks you through our exact structure, set up and how we use ClickUp in general here at zenpilot. And with that being said, let's get to the tutorial. All right, so let's jump in a ClickUp here and start talking about how we can actually manage our contractors and freelancers inside of our ClickUp workspace. And so the first step that we want to go through is how we should actually set up and structure our ClickUp workspace to be able to to do this. And if you've watched any of my videos before and been following our content, you'll know our main hierarchy that we recommend, essentially. Again, if you haven't seen this, I recommend you go watch the video. I'll put it in the top right. If you want to familiarize yourself with our hierarchy overall, that'll be a good first step before you jump into this video. But essentially what I'm going to do is I have my workspace level, which your workspace is essentially your business. You're going to have one workspace. And inside of ClickUp, and you can see your workspace, you can see all the tasks in your ClickUp workspace here at the everything level. And then all these spaces are going to be represented by those larger teams or departments within my organization. So oftentimes for agencies or client services, basically anyone that services clients, your hierarchy is probably going to be something along the lines of a delivery space, which is where all of your client work is going to live. As you can see here, I have all my client folders, so all of my client work is going to live inside of this one space. I also have growth, which is basically all the work for growing our business with sales and marketing, that work will live in there. And then I have operations, where really everything else Lives. So hr, finance, professional development, party planning, whatever it may be, all that's going to go here inside of the operations space. And so for the sake of this video, I'm going to focus primarily on delivery, because this is where we're actually going to be working with our contractors and and freelancers. So oftentimes what you're able to do, and hopefully you've done this in the past, but you have members inside of ClickUp, but you also have guests. And so the way that ClickUp works, essentially every member that you have in your ClickUp workspace, you'll then have five guest users as well. So if you were to go into your settings, you can see all the people here. If I come here, you'll see I have full members, but I also have guests. And so your guests can be really filled by your contractors and freelancers. You don't always have to have them be full members unless they need access to a lot of different things in ClickUp. But if they are a full member, you're going to have to pay for your seat. You can have free guests in here that are going to have great capabilities, especially for a contractor or freelancer, if they're only on a couple projects or working with a few clients. I'd highly recommend that you just use guest access for your freelancers. The one thing about guest access is they can't have access to an entire space. So oftentimes people make the mistake of they have all their client folders be spaces instead of those folders, they bring it up a level, and then it's pretty hard to invite their contractors or freelancers into that space because they can't. You can only give access to a contractor or freelancer, just a guest user at the folder or list level. So what I could do if I wanted to, and I'm going to give you a bit better of a way, because if I wanted to, I would be able to come here into the folder settings at Food Lion Sharing and Permissions, and I can go and invite a guest this way. Just type in their email and make sure you just label them as a guest. As you can see here, we have a bunch of different guests in here. If I wanted to share it with myself as a guest user, I would be able to do that. But the reason that that's not always the best way is because essentially what you're doing is you're giving them access to everything that lives within this folder. And oftentimes, depending on your relationships with your contractors and freelancers, you might not want to give them that much access, you might only want them to be focused in working and seeing the tasks that are assigned to them and maybe sort of the communication within that overall deliverable or project. So me giving access to them here at the folder level is fine, depending on the relationship that you may have with, with that contractor or freelancer. But sometimes we want to pare back those permissions and that security so they're not getting access to everything that happens within this Food lion client. What you could do is if you have your lists represented by a retainer contract or even a project, I could just give them access to that. But again, they're going to see all the different tasks in there, they're going to get access to everything in that list. So again, sometimes you might not want them to see all of that. So I want to give you a better way to be able to manage this process overall. So what you are able to do, and let's take a step back now, one, when it comes to actually managing your freelancer, so getting a good sort of view of all of them, sort of their cost rates to you and things like that, what their expertise is, what you're able to do is you can create a mission control space inside of ClickUp. And what's in this mission control space is essentially client related records, clients contracts, external costs and expenses that you may have, as well as internal records in here as well. So we have our team directory, we have a tech stack, we have our out of office time as well as our contractor database, which is where we'll spend some of our time right now. So inside of this contractor database list is essentially all of my different contractors or freelancers that we have available for our team to work with and bring on to a client project if we need them. So as you can see here, essentially the tasks are represented by the names of those contractors. And then all these other custom fields are just giving us additional detail and data on that contractor for us to have a little bit more information on them if someone else is going to be navigating to this and needs to know, hey, can I bring this person on for this certain project? So as you can see here, what we're doing, we have a people custom field here labeled Contractor, which is essentially going to just be labeled by the actual guest user of that contractor. So as you can see here, Jeff Seifer, represented by Jeff Seifer here, that's my guest account in this workspace. And then after that we also have the contractor status which is represented by active, maybe they're onboarding, they're active, offboarding or inactive. We have their email addresses in here as well. We have contractor categories to kind of know sort of what's their expertise. Are they SEO specialist, a copywriter, designer, so on and so forth. We have their payment types. So if they're charging us by the hour, by the project, by the deliverable, or even monthly, we have their rate. So again, hourly rate of $50, a project rate of $1,000 or per deliverable of 15. So you can have all that document in there. You can have their proficiency level, medium, low or high. And then in addition, the services that they offer your business. So all of that is documented here to give me a great view, kind of a dashboard here, but it's a view and ClickUp to be able to manage all of my contractors in one place. So again, that's not necessarily working with contractors, but it's allowing me to kind of see what contractors we have available to our firm. In addition to that, in this list, you could also have a couple different views. We're just having a board view here to be able to kind of see the different statuses of these different contractors. I can have my inactive contractors here in a list and I can also have a contractor onboarding form, which I'll get to on a little bit later. But this is a great way for me to bring a contractor on board and fire off a few different tasks and set up things that I'll need to do when a contractor gets set up inside of our ClickUp workspace. So again, we'll get to that in a moment. But when I talk about how we're actually going to be working with our contractors here inside of ClickUp. So again, that's the first piece again, having that list to be able to manage all of your contractors and then be able to kind of fire off those onboarding tasks, which we'll get to after we go through working with contractors. So that's in Mission Control, but now we want to talk about where we're actually working with them. And so what you're going to do is you can set up a contractor management space right here where their actual work is going to live. So if I come here, drop this down. We have different folders and these folders are represented by the different contractor categories. As you can see, SEO Specialist right here we have Copywriter, and then we have Designer, which is their HubSpot specialist as well. These folders will be represented by these contractor categories, which is just kind of a great way to Group all of those together. So that's the space contractor management, the folders represented by those categories and then the list under here are going to be list per contractor. So SEO specialist of Jeff Seifer. Jeff Seifer will have his own list right here. And this is essentially the his place, which my name is Jeff Cypher. So this is where my work would live as a contractor for Zenpilot here. My work is all going to live inside of this one list. So you're going to make it way easier for your contractors to not have to get distracted by everything else going on. Essentially, they have this list, hey, this is your work. This is what we need you to do. This is when it's due. This is the time estimate. You can track your time right here as well. We can show any additional custom fields to kind of show them the client, the work categories, the roles, things like that. But all of their work is going to happen right here. And this is really all I need to see, all I need to go to to make it super easy for me to use as a contractor because they might not be as trained inside of ClickUp as the rest of your team. So we want to make sure it's super easy for them to work with us. So in addition, in this list, again, these are all of my tasks, which I'll show you how these tasks actually get assigned to in just a moment. I also have a view here for my closed tasks as well, so I can see what I've actually completed. And I can also create a document here for all of my contractors, which is just sort of a brief onboarding for them to make sure their notification settings are set up correctly, make sure they add a profile picture and then how to work with us here inside of ClickUp. So if they need to communicate with the rest of the team, if they need to change any statuses, they need to know what those mean, so on and so forth. All of this is going to be in here for them to get onboarded and understand how they're going to work with us inside of ClickUp. Just to make it a bit easier for both sides of this for the contractor as well as us, to make sure the time gets recorded and things like that. So this is where all of their work is going to live. But in terms of assigning this work, I'm not going to go ahead and create work inside of this list. As you can see here, this task is actually living inside of that client folder in my delivery space. If you see all the breadcrumbs up Here it's in delivery. Hannaford, Hannaford Paid Media. But I'm actually assigned to this task, so I want to show you how that process works. And so to make this process work, we are going to need to use a ClickApp called subtasks in Multiple lists. So if I come up here, if you've never used clickapps before, Truffle you have. These are essentially additional features and functionalities that I can turn on inside of ClickUp. So if I come here to search for subtasks, multiple lists, which is actually called tasks in multiple lists, just like this, I'll find the click app that needs to be turned on. So tasks and multiple list. But I also want to make sure that I have this subtasks and multiple list turned on just like that. And just make sure that this is toggled over and it's blue to let you know that you are able to take subtasks and put them into multiple lists. And so one thing to note here, depending on your ClickUp plan, if you're a business plan or below, you're going to be a bit limited to be able to actually do this. And so business has about a thousand subtasks that could be used in multiple lists, whereas if you get the Business plus or Enterprise, you're at the unlimited level. So it doesn't really matter how many subtasks you have in multiple lists, you have really no limitations. So you want to make sure that depending on your plan and how many contractors you work with, you want to make sure that you're on the right plan. So I'd recommend Business plus, at least for most teams that have a lot of contractors that they're working with, because you're going to need to have those subtasks in multiple lists to be able to put that task inside of that contractor's list. So again, make sure that's turned on. Make sure you have the right plan. If you have any questions about plans, leave them in the comments below. Be happy to help you out with that. But again, that's the main click app that you're going to need turned on here inside of ClickUp. So now I'm going to go back to my workspace and let's actually talk about how we're going to move and put work inside of this list for our contractors. So again, all of our active work for clients is going to live inside of the delivery space. So inside of this space I have all of my folders where that work is actually going to live per client. So if I Go to Food lion here. As you'll see, all the Food lion for this marketing 2023 retainer is all going to live in there. But I want to make sure that the work that's living in this process here. So as you can see, we have this employee of the month blog post that's right here. We want to make sure that this, this, this work here can get assigned to our contractors so that they can work with us in the same workflow that my internal team is working out of. Because we want to make sure that this is not two separate things. We don't want to be working here and our contractors working there. We want to make sure it's all in the same workflow to make it very easy for the team to see statuses and where work actually lives. So what I'd be able to do is I can actually kind of assign work in here. So if you ever use Guests in ClickUp, you'll know that I can't come in here because our contractors don't have access to this folder or this space. I can't actually go and assign this work to them. So how do we assign it to our contractors and then move it to the correct list? What you'd be able to do is I can essentially, let's say I have this task and this task and this task I need to be assigned to our contractor Jeff. What I'd be able to do is use that custom field that I talked about a little bit earlier. Remember that contractor custom field that was in that mission control space? We want to make sure that this is living in our delivery space as well. And I can use this and then I can say who's this contractor that needs to be assigned to it? I can say Jeff, just like that. And now I'm going to hit save. And so from there we have a couple automations set up in the background here. So I'll show you what that looks like in delivery space. If I come here to my space settings just like that, go into my automations, Active Automations, I'll show you down here. What we have is when a custom field changes contractor, which is the one that I just applied to Jeff, what I'm going to do is add those tasks to the list of Jeff Cypher. So remember this is the contractor list that I showed you earlier. So anytime I apply that custom field of contractor, it's a people custom field to Jeff, it's going to then add those tasks to my contractor list just like that. So you'll see if I Go back down to this contractor list here. SEO specialist Jeff Seifer will see those tasks that I just assigned to him are now moved to this list. So we'll see write the blog outline, write the copy and apply blog proofing. Revisions are all right here. And the way that these get assigned is essentially now I have another automation. So we're getting this to be a bit sort of complex with all these automations, but once you set it up, it's going to be all automatic for you. But if I go to the list settings automations, you'll see anytime a task gets added to this list here, existing task or subtask is added to this location. We're now changing the assignees to Jeff Seifer, our guest user, that contractor. And you'll see again, that's how this all gets assigned out. Now all the tasks are in here. So if he were to go in here to write the blog outline, he would see his task and now he's able to kind of see the whole workflow as well. And and then to leave a comment to say when this task is done, I can come up here and communicate with the rest of the team. So we want to make sure that this communication happens in one place. But it's super helpful here because now I'll get my task. I can still get access to really this whole deliverable if I have my workflow set up like this, but I can go back up, I can complete this just like that. I can track my time on here as well. And then I can go back up to the employee of the month blog post here. This parent task, leave a comment at mention, whoever needs to be mentioned in this just to let everyone know that I'm done with my task and communicate with the team well there. So again, makes it super easy for me to see that whole workflow have all of this connected to our. Our contractors and freelancers aren't sort of working in something that's separate from what the rest of our team's working on. Makes it easy to have that workflow all in one place, but kind of in two separate places because again, we're using that subtasks, multiple lists and just make this a much easier experience for everyone overall. So again, that task now is going to be moved into my closed task, so I'll be able to see it here as well. I want to make sure that I have that time tracked there and we'll be good to go. So if I go back up to the delivery space, we'll be able to see those Changes here in the Food lion there we'll see that that task was closed out and we'll also see if we wanted to. I can see that that task was actually assigned to Jeff in here. So if I go into my subtasks and I look at the assignees, you'll see write blog copies assigned and apply blog proofing revisions is assigned to Jeff Seifer though it's kind of a little hack in here because remember, I can't actually assign this to Jeff. If I go to a different task, I wouldn't be able to do that. But because of this, putting that subtask in another list, assigning it there now, is going to put that assignee back in this place because it's the same exact subtask. It's not a different task, it's just living in multiple lists. So that allows you to assign a task out, get it in the right spot and make sure we're all working within the same workflow. So it's super easy again to manage contractors and freelancers that way. So now that we know how we actually go and assign work out like that, let's take a step back and talk about how we actually get some of that process and that workflow set up. And remember when I was in my mission control space, if I go to my internal records in this contractor database, I had this contractor onboarding form all set up and ready to go for me to onboard a new contractor. So let's fill this out and I'll show you sort of what happens from here. Because essentially when you want to bring on a new contractor, let's say we hire one on upwork or somewhere and we want to bring them on board, all we need to do is fill out this form and that's going to fire off the rest of the tasks to essentially go and set all of the lists and things up for that new contractor. So again, you want to have a good workflow and process here. But as you can see, let's just say we're going to bring in Michael Scott and we'll pause this video real quick so you don't have to watch me do all of this. So after you have the form filled out and you have all the data in here with the contractor name, their email, their status, which you'll want to make onboarding because that's actually going to help with a few automations, actually fire off some of these onboarding tasks. You want to make sure you have the category in there, which again you'll label this to specific categories. That you may have for your contractors. You'll have your payment type, the rate, the proficiency level as well as the area of expertise. Now you're ready to go ahead and click submit. So I'll show you what happens after we hit submit. If you ever use ClickUp forms before, essentially the first thing that's going to happen, all ClickUp form submissions will create tasks in the list that that form lives in. So if I have a form in the contractor database list, essentially that's going to go ahead and create the task right here. So as you can see, that's essentially what that did. We have Michael Scott, we have all the additional custom fields that I labeled within that form. So these are all set up and ready to go. The other piece of this again, I'll show you what this onboarding process looks like, but we're actually going to have to go and make sure that Michael Scott now has a folder or a list set up here in the contractor management space. And he's actually going to have to be invited as a guest to his personal list there. So that's going to make it right now he's not a guest we need to invite once so we can actually get this contractor people field labeled as Michael Scott. So that's the first step that's going to happen just to help you manage and just get that record in this contractor database list. But the next thing that's going to happen is that's actually going to via automation fire off some onboarding tasks inside of our operation space. So if I go here to the automations in this contractor database list, as we'll see here, we have a couple different automations set up. I'll show you what one of these is here. But essentially again when a custom field changes the contractor status from any to onboarding. So even if you don't use that form and you just put a contractor in there and you label it as onboarding, that's still going to fire this off. But what that does then is it creates a task. The task name will be perform contractor onboarding for the task name, which in this case is Michael Scott. So if that task name equals your contractor, that'll help label that to make it easier to read of what this task actually is. And here we'll have this list is going to be in the internal tasks list inside of our operation space. So that's where the task is actually going to go to. And then we can also use a task template that we have created in our process library which is down here as you can see it's a little faded over there, but that'll be built in our process library and then saved into the ClickUp template center. So we have that and it's just going to have a checklist in there as well as SOP document. Just to make it easier for our team to go through that process. We'll update the status to to do and then make the due date on trigger date there. So you want to have a automation set up in that list to essentially fire off this onboarding task to again make sure that the process is followed by and Michael Scott gets his contractor list set up so that he's ready to go and ready to work with us and our team. So I'll show you what that looks like again, that creates a task there that then fires off that automation and that's going to go ahead and create the task in this operation space inside of this internal task list. So what that looks like. Again, this is using a task template that we have inside of our ClickUp template center. So you can leverage that which allows you to have things like checklists in there, any task description, some time estimates and additional custom fields. That's the good advantage of using a task template as opposed to just creating a task from scratch. As you can see here, I have the relevant SOP document ready to go for this person and a very defined checklist for them to follow. So this is going to take them through the whole process of what we need to do. Essentially what we need to do is set up that folder or we have that folder already built out. But if it's a new type of contractor, we're going to need a new folder. But then we need to actually go ahead and create Michael Scott's list again. We have gifts, gifs, whatever you want to call them here to help show someone how to do that, and so on and so forth, actually inviting them as a guest to that list. So the whole process is here documented, setting up the automations and we'll be all ready to go. So again, the biggest advantage you could do here is actually building a lot of templates to make this process way easier. Because as you can see here, if I go to my contractor list for Jeff Cypher, we have all of these. You have a document here, we have a couple different views as well. And so this is all set up very easily if I go ahead and actually build that as a template inside of my process library here. So this is an additional space that I didn't quite talk about as much. But if You've seen my other videos, you'll know all about the process library because I talk about it a ton of. But in this, I'm able to build out templates for things like this. So my processes, my workflows for actually onboarding our contractors is all going to be built out here. So as you can see here, I have a general list templates folder. So we'll see this contractor, it's just labeled contractor name. But again, as you can see, my tasks, my closed tasks, also this document here with a finalized ClickUp onboarding task that'll always be assigned to that new contractor as they come on board to make sure everything's set up correctly for them. So that'll be their first task. And all this is built out inside of this template. All I need to do is make sure that this one is actually saved as a template in the template center, and then I can deploy it over and over and over again for every single contractor or freelancer that we bring on board. So it's going to make it a very easy process to manage all that, get everything set up, get them onboarded and ready to go. So a couple other things that'll be important when you actually invite a contractor to this list, you'll know they have different permission settings that you can set up. So if I come here to this Jeff Seifer list, which is example we've been talking about, I'll be able to go here into sharing of permissions. You want to make sure if they're going to be actually tracking time for your team, you want to make sure that they have the ability to edit. So this is going to make it so that they can edit tasks in list settings, which is fine because they're in just their own personal list here. They're not in the rest of our workspace, so they can't really edit all that much, which is great. But that'll also help it. So they can actually go ahead and track time and things like that. So you'll also, if you want to, you can come to your people settings. So let's jump into my settings here. Go back to people just like that. If I go to my guests, as we'll see here, this is their permission. So I can see time estimates and I can also see the time track, which is going to give me the ability to track time in there. And you also see you can allow them to remove tags if they want, as well as create views and things like that. So I can narrow this down as much as I want as long as they can track time if they need to track time and see those time estimates, that's probably the two minimum that you're going to want to have in there. If again they're going to be tracking time for you. So just make sure you have that set up, make sure they're invited correctly and just make sure you have a good process default find with those templates for actually setting all of this up for your freelancers. And so the other great part about this too, and this is a big reason that I have sort of this framework set up with this contractor management space is now as I build all of these in here and I have all of my contractors here with their own lists, if I want to actually be able to manage them, see sort of the tasks that are assigned to them, see workload for my contractors, I can come up to the space level and see all of that information here. So it's going to be much easier than going to the delivery space and creating a bunch of filters and views and things to see all this. If I just want to see my contractors in the work that's assigned to them and what they're working on, I come to this space here. We could see tasks by role, which is actually a custom field that we use to assign work very easily. So I can see that there. I could see the strategist, task, copywriter, proofer, new hire tasks, that's all going to be there. I could see tasks by by contractor. So it'll be here who what's assigned to Jeff Seifer or another contractor. I'll be able to see all of that work there tasks by client by utilizing the custom field here. So as we can see, Jeff is working for Guava Box, Food lion and Hannaford by work category. And also if I wanted to go ahead and see it by workload as well, I'd be able to see a workload for my contractors here too just to make sure that they're not overworked or under worked. And we're just meeting sort of our agreement that we have with them. So again, this process is going to be great, especially if you have a bunch of different contractors that you're working with that maybe you have some full time contractors that are really working with you like 40 hours a week and maybe they have a bit more access and you can give them more access to some of your spaces and folders and lists and maybe they are a full time member in your ClickUp workspace that you're actually paying for their seat. But if they're not if you're working with a bunch of contractors that are just for certain projects or deliverables, or you just need them here and there, this is kind of a great way to again, be able to manage all of them inside of one space, make sure that they're working with us on the same sort of workflows and processes because again, you want to make sure that the tasks are living in multiple lists here because then they're sort of working on the same workflow as us as opposed to two separate things. So that's going to be super important. But this is just a great way to get all of their work in one spot for them, as well as put it into our workflow that our internal team is working on so that we're all communicating and working out of that same workflow, that same process for tracking time, as well as keeping status updates there and communication overall. So now that we've seen that, I want to transition to showing you what it actually looks like for a contractor when they're working in their own personal list. So now when I transition to looking at what it looks like in a contractor standpoint and what they're going to actually see when they log into their ClickUp workspace, as I jump into this, as you can see, what I'm able to actually see in here is I'm going to have a shared with me sort of folder, whatever you want to call it, just a shared with me space. And underneath that is going to be my list. And so again, this is all I'm seeing. I'm not seeing any of the folders for clients, any of the spaces or anything. I'm just seeing the list with all of my tasks in here. So again, my permission settings are narrowed way down. I can only see what's tied to me. Makes it way easier for me to sort of manage all of this process. And I'm not going to get confused, especially as a freelancer, maybe I don't know near as much about ClickUp as your internal team does. So it makes it very easy for me on the other end as well as make it easier for you to manage them, their workload and actually assign work out to them. So if I come here, I have my list again, here's my views. I can see my close tasks. I can also see this little document for me, click up 101 for contractors. So I'm able to kind of help pare down my notifications, just make sure I have documentation to know what I'm supposed to do when I actually get in here. So it's a bit more scalable for you to actually onboard new contractors. But again, if I come here, if I want to actually see the tasks that are assigned to me, I'll see this here and I can see the whole workflow as well. So I'm able to come in here, I can track my time, I can change the status, and then I can also communicate with the rest of the team here inside of ClickUp. So you want to make sure again, they have the ability to edit, they can comment in here as well so that they can communicate with your team and just know what's happening as well. You don't want to keep them out on an island. But again, they might not need to know everything that's happening with this client, they just need to know what's happening within this one specific deliverable which this is a great way to manage that process and make it easier for them overall. So again, I can comment in here, I can track my time, I can see all that I need to see and I'm not seeing too much to confuse me. It's all just a little bit easier for me to manage and for your internal team to manage as well. And that's how you work with contractors and freelancers inside of ClickUp. So please, if you like this video you found it helpful, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver weekly content. For those trying to get the most out of ClickUp. Or if you have any questions, comments or feedback in general, leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And lastly, if you'd like this exact contractor management structure that I just walked through with the SOPs, the process processes, the templates and the automations and training and everything included, go to zenpilot.com ClickUp contractor management to learn more. We'd love to help you manage your contractors and freelancers inside of ClickUp. And with that, that's all I have for today. Thanks for watching. I'll see you again next time. It's about time. It's about time.