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You’ve made an offer, signed a contract, and now it’s time for your contractor to get started.
If only it were that simple. For most companies, the contractor onboarding process can take months of back-and-forth with paperwork, verifying credentials and banking information, and making sure the administrative side of working together, well, works.
That’s because traditional HR and AP systems aren’t built for contractors, which leaves accounting and human resources teams cobbling together multiple systems—or using spreadsheets to keep everything organized. That’s okay if you use only one or two contractors for your business, but if you’re looking to scale big with 1099 help, you’ve got a big problem.
What if contractor onboarding could take days or weeks, instead of months?
In this post, we’ll talk through what an ideal contractor onboarding process should look like and how Wingspan can help you achieve it.
Contractor onboarding takes many moving parts behind-the-scenes
Onboarding a full-time, W2 employee is a one-time event. Sure, it may take them a few weeks to learn the ins and outs of working at your company, but you don’t have to constantly re-evaluate their credentials or banking information as you do with your contractors.
That’s part of what makes contractor onboarding so challenging. There’s a long list of information you need to make working together go smoothly, and because the work isn’t consistent, it may change.
For contractors, you need:
- A signed contract, W9, and NDA if needed
- Identification information like their full legal name, current address, and TIN (either SSN or EIN, depending on their business model)
- A background check
- Insurance and license verification
- Banking details and payment information
This creates a multi-step process that often requires back-and-forth to get the information in the right administrative systems, which often don’t talk to one another. This can take weeks—or even months—which is time you don’t have to waste.
That also means if there is an error, it’s more difficult to notice and fix it before it becomes an issue (say, when you’re filling out 1099 forms for tax season, where a mistake can cost hefty fines for both freelancer and employer.)
The ideal contractor onboarding process takes a week or less
Your contractor onboarding process doesn’t need to take months of slow, painstaking back-and-forth between your admin team and your contractor. The three elements of a streamlined contractor onboarding process are:
- Automation: The more you can remove manual processes and tools from your onboarding process, the faster it will go—and the less room there is for error. Real-time TIN verification, automated payment notifications for contractors, or recurring invoices are all ways to add automation into your contractor onboarding process.
- Standardization: Even if you work with different kinds of contractors, create a repeatable process to onboard each one. Send a packet to your new contractors the same way you would to your new hires, which includes a template contract, W9, ACH form with invoicing instructions, and other “working together” info like brand values, key contacts to ask for help, and an overview of the tools they’ll be using.
- Self-service: Your contractors are going to have questions and concerns—especially around payment. Make it easy for them to speak with someone rather than go around and around. That could be a dedicated help email address, a form, slack channel, or designating one person on your team as the go-to liaison for your contractors.
To do this, you need the right tools. That’s where Wingspan comes in.
Streamlined contractor onboarding makes switching to Wingspan easy
Wingspan can automate, standardize, and offer self-service for your onboarding process so you can stop stitching together multiple systems and get your contractors moving on their projects right away. Plus, Wingspan handles payments and tax compliance so everything you need to manage your contractors is in one place.
“Wingspan has been a game-changer for our business, saving my team hundreds of hours onboarding inspectors, processing invoices, and running reports.” - Jake Ciorciari, EVP of Majestic Services
Loss control inspection company Majestic spent hundreds of hours onboarding new inspectors, manually checking payments, and handling contractor emails before they found Wingspan. “I couldn’t afford to waste 2-3 hours every Monday,” says EVP Jake Ciorciari. “Wingspan has been a game-changer for our business, saving my team hundreds of hours onboarding inspectors, processing invoices, and running reports.”
When customers sign up for Wingspan, we work together to implement a solution that can handle all of their contractor management needs. That starts with understanding your unique challenges and how Wingspan can solve them.
When telehealth company Teladoc approached us for help with onboarding their providers—and making sure their invoices reflected all of their work, including consults—we created a self-service portal for their provider team where they could easily see their payment, tax, and personal information. From there, we built a phased onboarding plan for your entire contractor base so the switch feels easy—and there’s no disruption to your day-to-day workflow.
Automating their payment reconciliation process reduced errors and post-payroll help tickets from providers. “We didn’t have a really good solution for receiving payments and splitting those payments,” says Tricia McGimpsey,Head of Global Payroll & HRIS at Teladoc. “That’s why we are so very pleased to come across Wingspan…that split was a game changer for us."Here is an example of what an implementation timeline with Wingspan looks like:
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With Wingspan, you can:
- Collect W-9 data, verify TIN information and handle background checks
- Import payment details and deliver automatic invoice payments
- Provide a self-service portal for contractors makes it easy for them to make changes or ask questions
See how Wingspan can streamline your contractor onboarding process >
