Field Service Software for Subcontractors, Without the Login Juggling
By Oleg Goriachev · Appliance repair business owner and Taskrol founder
Early on I worked for more than one company at once. If you've done appliance repair you know how that goes: you're a tech for two or three outfits, each one runs a different app, and your day turns into a login carousel. Log out of one. Log into the next. Try to remember which invoice belongs to which company and hope you didn't cross the wires. Most field service software for subcontractors treats this like an edge case, and you feel it every day.
Here's the thing that surprised me when I looked at how the big platforms handle it. They do have a subcontractor feature. It's just built the wrong way around.
Take Workiz. A subcontractor there is a free user who can't log in at all. You add them and then text or email them the job. So they're on the receiving end of a message, not actually working inside the app with a business of their own. Housecall Pro goes a different route: contractors get added into your account as team members through payroll. They live under your company's login, not theirs.
Both approaches assume the same thing, and it's the thing I disagree with. They assume the subcontractor has no identity of their own. He's either a phone number you text or a seat inside your account. Neither one connects you to a real, separate company that also runs its own jobs.
Taskrol does it the way the relationship actually works. A contractor is his own company with his own Taskrol account, running his own clients and his own day. You don't build a stub user for him. You invite him onto your team, same as adding a friend.
He accepts, you assign him work from your company, and it shows up in his own account. The one he's already logged into. No logging out, no second password, no switching companies in a dropdown. To him it's just another job in the app he already uses. To you, he's a set of hands you dispatch and track like any tech.
And the part that matters for money: when your contractor closes a job you gave him, the invoice goes out under your company. Customer pays by card, that charge lands with your company too. The customer sees one clean brand, which is yours. He did the work, you billed it, you got paid. That's the real arrangement repair shops have with each other, and no login carousel can carry it.
Two things fall out of building it this way. If you're the one sending work, you can grow past your own payroll, pulling in independent techs for overflow or out-of-area calls without onboarding them into your company or handing over your login. And if you're the tech taking work from a few companies, you finally stop juggling apps, because every company's jobs land in the one account that's actually yours.
You keep your business. He keeps his. The work moves between you without anybody pretending to be someone else. That's what working with subcontractors should feel like.