For agencies🏢 Agency Management
Schedule contractors on purchased (bought) time
Buy blocks of a contractor's time, schedule them like staff during those windows, and pay per block instead of per job.
Purchased time is an optional add-on for agencies that buy chunks of a contractor's time up front. During a bought block the contractor is scheduled like a staff member, and instead of per-job pay, you pay one amount per block: the block's hours times a purchased-time rate. The add-on is enabled per agency by OneTerp; contact support to turn it on.
Step by step
- 1Once the add-on is enabled, go to Operations → Team Roster and open the contractor.
- 2In the Purchased Time card, turn on "Purchased time contractor" and set the purchased time rate ($/hr) you pay for their blocks.
- 3Open Staff, then Schedules: the contractor now appears alongside your W-2 staff with a "Purchased time" badge.
- 4Draw their bought blocks just like staff shifts (recurring weekly or one-off dates), their bars show in violet instead of teal.
- 5On the dispatch board, violet "Purchased time" bands mark their bought windows, drop jobs into them like any assignment.
- 6When a block's day has passed, it appears in Billing → Interpreter Payouts as a "Purchased time block" line (hours × rate) in the contractor's payout group, and is paid through your normal payout batches.
Tips
- Jobs that fall fully inside a bought block pay the contractor nothing per-job, no service fee or travel, and show "Covered by purchased time" in billing. Out-of-pocket expenses are still reimbursed.
- Jobs outside the bought windows pay like normal contractor jobs.
- A job that is only partly inside a block pays the contractor for the minutes outside it, each at the rate running at that time. So if the block ends at 4:30 and an evening differential starts at 5, the time after 5 is paid at the evening rate, and a drive home after the block is paid too.
- Customers are billed exactly the same either way, purchased time only changes what you pay the contractor.
- If no purchased-time rate is set, blocks fall back to the contractor's base hourly rate.
- Other agencies just see the contractor as busy during your bought blocks, they never see why. A contractor can also choose to hide your blocks from their other agencies altogether.
- The contractor sees their bought blocks, read-only, in Bought Time HQ, in their own sidebar.
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