Your subs and vendors are the people who get the work done — the framers, plumbers, drywall crews, material suppliers, the whole bench. Eano gives you two ways to bring them into your team: enter their info yourself, or send them a link and let them fill it in. This article walks through both paths, the reminders that keep things moving, and the permissions you control once they’re in.

If you’re looking for help with the agreement side of things — sending out subcontracts, collecting signatures, tracking change orders — that’s a separate workflow. Adding someone to your team here is the prerequisite, but it doesn’t lock them into anything. Think of this step as adding a name to your roster; the subcontract is the contract you hand them later.

Open the People section and head to the Vendors + Subcontractors tab. That’s home base for everyone outside your company who works with you. The “Add” button in the top corner is what kicks off the flow.

When you click “Add,” Eano asks two quick questions: is this a vendor or a subcontractor, and are they regulated? “Regulated” is just our shorthand for “you’ll want license and insurance details on file” — typical for trades, less common for, say, a lumberyard. Pick what fits, and Eano adjusts the form accordingly.

Then you choose how to get their info into the system: Add manually or Ask for info.

Pick this when you already have everything you need — maybe they sent you a W-9 last month, or you just want to drop in a name and email and circle back later.

The form has sections for the basics (name, phone, email, role), business info (company name, address, the trades they cover, their service area), and the paperwork that tends to matter for compliance: license details, insurance certificates, payment info, W-9, and Master Service Agreement. You don’t have to fill in every field — name is the only thing we actually require to get them on your list. Everything else you can layer in over time.

A quick note: if you plan to switch them to the “Ask for info” path later, you’ll need either an email or a phone number on file before we can send them the link. Name alone is enough to create the record, but it’s not enough to reach out.

This path is fast, and great for one-offs. The downside is that you’re the one doing the typing, and you’re trusting your own copy of their info. If their license is about to expire or their insurance lapsed, you won’t know until you check.

This is the path most teams reach for once they’ve used Eano for a few weeks. Instead of typing in their details yourself, you send the sub or vendor a link and let them fill in their own info.

To send the link, we need two things from you: their name, and at least one way to reach them — an email address, a phone number, or both. If we don’t have a way to contact them, there’s nowhere to send the link.

When you choose “Ask for info,” Eano asks which pieces you want them to provide. Three of the most common live at the top of the list: Payment Information, Master Service Agreement, and W-9. Below those, you’ll find a custom-documents area for the other things you might need — liability insurance, workers’ comp, auto insurance, state license, EPA certification, and so on. Check off whichever apply, and Eano sends the sub a personalized link by email (and by text, if you’ve given us their phone number). The link is good for seven days.

On the other end, your sub clicks the link, lands on a simple form, and fills in only the things you asked for. When they’re done, the info flows straight into their record on your team — no re-typing on your side, and you’ve got it from the source.

Sometimes you’d rather skip the email and text, and just send the link through your own channel — a quick text from your phone, a Slack message, a WhatsApp, an in-person hand-off on the job site. Eano supports this. Instead of clicking the main Send Invite button, look for the Add & Copy Link button right below it. Clicking it does two things at once: it adds the sub to your team, and it copies a registration link to your clipboard. Paste that link wherever you want it to go.

A nice side benefit of this path: because you’re delivering the link yourself, you don’t need to have an email or phone on file for the sub. A name is all we need to spin up the link. (Vendors still need a Master Service Agreement attached, just like the other paths.)

If you’ve already clicked “Send Invite” and want a copy of the link too — say, to text it as a backup — the confirmation screen that pops up after sending shows the registration link with a Copy button right next to it. Same link the sub got in their email, ready for the clipboard.

A few reasons teams prefer this path:

Subs are busy. They mean to fill out the form, then a roof gets ripped off somewhere and they forget. Eano handles the follow-up so you don’t have to play receptionist.

Reminders are on by default. The moment you send an “Ask for info” invitation, we start the follow-up clock — and if the sub still hasn’t completed the form, we send them a nudge at 24 hours, 48 hours, 4 days, 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, and 30 days. The reminders go to the same email (and phone, if we have it) as the original invite, and they stop the moment the sub fills things in. You don’t have to lift a finger to make this happen.

If you’d rather Eano didn’t send these reminders — say, you have your own follow-up process and don’t want your subs getting two nudges from two places — you can turn them off. Open your Notification Settings (from the onboarding/settings area of your dashboard), find the Vendor and Subcontractor Management section, and toggle off Profile completion reminders. The setting applies team-wide, so flipping it off stops the automatic nudges for every pending invitation, not just future ones. You can flip it back on the same way.

To recap: reminders are on out of the box, they fire automatically on the schedule above, and the only thing you’d ever need to do is turn them off if you don’t want them.

If you want to give them a manual nudge — say, you just got off the phone with them and want to re-send the link while it’s top of mind — you can do that too. Open the sub’s profile and use the “Request Information” section to re-send. The automatic reminders keep running in the background either way.

If the original link expires before they get to it (the seven-day window), no problem — re-sending the request from their profile generates a fresh one.

Adding someone to Vendors + Subcontractors is the foundation that the subcontract workflow builds on. Once a sub is on your team, you can attach them to a project, send them a subcontract for signature, issue change orders, and track payments — all without re-entering their info.

The two are deliberately decoupled. You don’t have to have a subcontract in hand to add someone, and adding someone doesn’t commit you to anything. A lot of GCs add a sub the first time they bid them out, then send a subcontract weeks or months later when the project actually breaks ground. That’s the intended flow.

This article is just about getting people onto your roster — the subcontract workflow itself is its own thing.

Once a sub is on your team, you decide how much of Eano they get to see. Permissions are configured once and apply across all your subs and vendors — it’s a team-wide setting, not a per-person or per-project one. You’ll find the toggles at the top of the Vendors + Subcontractors tab, in the “Permissions” area.

There are five toggles:

Flip any toggle off and that capability disappears for every sub on your team, immediately. Flip it back on and it’s restored. New subs you add inherit whatever the current settings are, so you don’t have to re-configure anything when someone joins.

A quick note on scope: these permissions govern what subs can see and do inside Eano. They don’t govern who’s assigned to what project — that’s handled separately when you add a sub to a specific job.

Does my sub have to pay anything to use Eano? No. There’s no cost on the sub’s side and no subscription required. They sign in, complete what you’ve asked them for, and use whatever parts of Eano they need to do the work — all free to them.

My sub already works with another GC who uses Eano. What happens when I add them? They keep the one Eano login they already have, and your team gets added to it. Subs can be on multiple GCs’ teams under a single identity, so they don’t end up juggling two logins. If you try to invite an email or phone that’s already tied to an account, Eano will recognize it and connect things up rather than creating a duplicate.

Can I bulk-import a list of subs from a spreadsheet? Not today — subs and vendors are added one at a time. If you’ve got a long list to bring in, the “Ask for info” path is usually the fastest way through it: drop in name and contact info for each, fire off the invitations, and let your subs do the heavy lifting on the rest.

Can I remove a sub from my team? Yes. Open the sub’s profile and use the remove option there. One thing to keep in mind: if the sub is currently assigned to active projects, you’ll need to unassign them first. Removing a sub doesn’t wipe their history — past projects, payments, and documents stay intact for your records.

What does my sub actually see when they log in? What’s available to them is shaped by the team-wide permissions you’ve configured — daily log upload, project tasks, project files, project schedule, and contract files. Anything you’ve toggled off is hidden; anything you’ve toggled on is in reach for the projects they’re working on with you.

The sub never got the link. What now? First, check that the email and phone on their record are right — that’s the most common cause. If those look fine, open their profile and re-send the request from the “Request Information” section. That generates a fresh link and a new outbound email/SMS.

Once your sub is on the team and their paperwork is squared away, you’re ready to put them to work — assigning them to projects, sending bid requests, issuing subcontracts, and processing their payments. All of those flows start here, with a sub on your roster.