Putting a sub on a job crew

What the Dispatch tab does

The Dispatch tab on a subcontractor's card is where you put a sub on one of your jobs. It is a small surface with one clear purpose, and its own intro says it plainly: "Put this sub on a job's crew. They show up on the job, and the work you log ties back here." Dispatching a sub does two things at once. On the job's side, the sub appears on that job's crew as a subcontractor, alongside your own people, so the job's record shows who was actually on it. On the sub's side, the assignment becomes part of their history, which is what keeps your performance logging honest later.

Open any sub from the Subcontractors page and swipe to Dispatch. The tab's badge counts the jobs they are currently assigned to.

Assigning a sub to a job

The top of the tab lists the jobs this sub is on right now, each by its client and category. If they are not on any, it reads "Not on any job crew yet."

Below that, + Assign to a job opens the picker. Under "Assign to", you see your open jobs (jobs that are active, in progress, or pending), most recent first, with any job the sub is already on filtered out. Tap a job and the assignment is made on the spot; the list updates without a reload, and assigning the same sub to the same job twice is harmless, Verinode simply keeps the one assignment.

If you have no open jobs at all, the picker does not pretend: "No open jobs to dispatch to. Jobs appear here while they are active." The door there is on the Jobs side, not this one; as soon as a job of yours is open, it shows up here to dispatch to.

Removing a sub, without losing anything

Every assigned job carries a Remove action. Removing a sub from a job deletes only the crew assignment; nothing else about the relationship is touched. The invoices they billed on that job stay on their Jobs & margin tab, every performance entry you logged stays on their record, and their reliability score does not move. Remove is for "they are no longer on this job", not "pretend this never happened", so you can keep crews accurate without ever being afraid of erasing history.

Why dispatch makes your performance logging honest

The quiet payoff of dispatching is attribution. When you log an engagement on a sub (on time or late, callback or clean, quality, backcharges), the logger asks which job the work belongs to, and the jobs you dispatched them to come first in that picker, ahead of the jobs they merely billed on. That ordering matters: it means the rating lands on the job where you actually put them, rather than on whichever invoice happened to arrive, and a sub who worked a job before their invoice showed up can still be rated against the right claim. Logged engagements are what build the reliability score that drives the trade rankings and the keep, watch, or replace verdict, so the cleaner the attribution, the more the score means. The logging flow itself is covered in logging a sub's performance.

A worked example

You open a water loss on Tuesday and put your drywall sub on it from their Dispatch tab. The job's crew now shows them as a subcontractor next to your two techs. Three weeks later the hang and finish is done, their invoice lands by email, and their cost appears on the job. When you log the engagement, that job is the first option in the picker; you mark it on time, quality four out of five, no callback. Months later, when you are deciding between them and a new drywall outfit in the trade rankings, that rating is tied to a real job you can open and reread, not a vague memory of a good month.

Data sources