In PSA, there are two user types: regular user and freelancer. Freelancers are external workers granted access to the system, for example, for time tracking, task completion, and project progress reporting. Freelancers can be an important part of a project team, but their role and permissions in PSA are often more limited than those of the company’s internal employees.
In PSA, freelancers are treated as external vendors who invoice for their services. Distinguishing freelancer costs from traditional salaried employees simplifies cost tracking in the system.
Hour and Cost Management
- Freelancers submit invoices to the company for their completed work, and these are processed as bills in PSA.
- This distinguishes freelancer costs from regular employee expenses.
- Freelancers do not receive an internal hourly cost in the system.
- Freelancers cannot create expenses or travel expenses.
- Freelancers do not accumulate hour balances because they are not employees of the company.
- However, a weekly working hour template (employment template) can be attached to freelancers so they can track their expected daily working hours.
Flexible Work Between Companies
- Freelancers are not tied to any specific company in the Enterprise+ multicompany installation.
- They can work on tasks across different companies, bringing flexibility and efficiency to resource management.
Reporting
- In the new reports, you can differentiate between freelancers and regular users using the User Type column.
- In the old reports, "(freelancer)" is displayed after the user's name.
- Freelancers do not have a user-specific company.
- Therefore, freelancer data will appear in reports filtered by the project's company, but not when filtered by the user’s specific company.
- Freelancers do not have an internal hourly cost on hour reports.
Permission Management
- Freelancer permissions can be defined in the same way as regular user permissions.
- Freelancers can be granted access to any company in the Enterprise+ multicompany installation.
Licenses
- Creating a freelancer user requires an active PSA license, just like regular PSA users.
- The user type (regular employee/freelancer) can only be changed later if the user is "deletable," meaning they have not accrued any materials like logged hours in the system.