Note: This article applies only to the beta release of Plane's Unified Payroll and HRIS release.
Add person
To add a new contractor, you need to sign in to your account and go to People → Add person
Fill in basic information (name, country, email)
Select ‘Contractor’ for the employment type
Optionally add a title, manager, and department
Select options for onboarding
‘Send contract’ should be selected unless you only want to add the contractor for informational tracking in the Plane HRIS. This initiates the standard process of establishing a contract and onboarding the contractor. All contractors who are onboarded will get set up for one-time payments.
‘Add to payroll’ should be selected when you want to add the contractor to recurring payroll in addition to enabling one-time payments.
Complete onboarding tasks
The onboarding process is organized and summarized using milestones: Prepare contract, Sign contract, Set up payments, and Collect compliance documents.
Each milestone has one or more tasks that are either immediately available or are dependent on other tasks. You can complete available tasks in any order. Learn more about the tasks for each milestone below.
Prepare contract
Set compensation
| A contractor’s wage type can be hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. |
Assign pay schedule | When hourly workers are assigned to a pay schedule, payroll items will be pre-populated with 0 hours for each pay period. You’ll need to enter and approve hours before the approval deadline for payments to be processed.
For all other wage types, payment accounts are calculated based on the pay schedule/frequency of pay. Learn more |
Set start date | The start date represents the contractor’s first day at work. If you are migrating a contractor from another payments system, the start date may be a date in the past.
The start date is useful for tracking purposes but is also used to calculate prorated pay for contractors with a non-hourly wage type who are assigned to a pay schedule.
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Collect contractor business and address details | This task is used to establish if the contractor is registered as an individual or as a business and to collect relevant address information. Business name and business address are required for contractors who are registered as a business.
You have the option of entering this information for yourself or assigning the task to the contractor. |
Prepare contract | You can use Plane's locally compliant contract or upload a signed contract of your own. When choosing Plane's contract you need to define the scope of work and effective date. You’ll also have options for:
Note: This task is currently dependent on 'Collect contractor business and address details' because it was implemented incorrectly. This dependency will be removed in the near future. |
Sign contract
Review and approve contract | This task gives you an opportunity to review all the inputs to the contract and make changes if necessary. |
Sign contract | This task is used to sign the contract. Sign when ready and send to the contractor for signature.
The contractor will receive an email notification letting them know the contract is ready for signature. |
Set up payments
Collect contractor payment information | This task is establishes a payment method/bank account for the contractor. You can enter this information yourself or assign it to the contractor. |
Collect compliance documents
Collect Form W-8 or W-9 for tax reporting | This task is used to collect the appropriate W-8 or W-9 form. You have the option to upload a completed form or to assign the task to the contractor. |
Inviting contractors to Plane
The process above gives you the flexibility to assign several tasks to the contractor. For example, it is usually easier to have the contractor provide their business and address details, set up their own bank account, and complete Form W-8 or W-9 through Plane. As soon as you assign any one of these tasks to the contractor, the contractor will be invited to get set up on Plane.
The contractor will also be invited to join Plane if they haven’t already been invited when you send the contract for signature.
Contractor tasks
When the contractor is invited to get set up on Plane, they will see a similar but simplified set of milestones and tasks.
Contractors are always assigned tasks to collect personal information such as preferred name, date of birth, and address information. As mentioned above, you can also assign specific tasks to the contractor to speed up onboarding.
Only when all onboarding tasks have been completed will the contractor be able to access the full set of Plane features to submit payment requests, view payments, create expense reports, and more.
Archive onboarding tasks
The final step to onboarding is archiving completed tasks. Once you've archived the completed tasks, the contractor will no longer appear on the Hiring page.
If you need any help with inviting a contractor to Plane, please let us know at support@plane.com.