What is a contractor license? – Natural HR Support

For many companies, as well as their direct employees, they may also have others who are not employees but whose information they wish to store in Natural HR such as contractors, volunteers and so on.

Contractors can be added as an employee which will use a full license but, depending on your use case, you may be able to opt for a contractor license which is available at a lower cost.

A contractor license allows you to store details about a person including their contact information, pay information, documents and notes but, crucially, you cannot:

access them in any modules (i.e. you cannot add time off, timesheets, expenses, training and so on for them)
add a manager, approver, start date, leave date etc against them
give them any system access via self service

Below is a table which lists the main differences between an employee and contractor license - for the purposes of the below, we are comparing a Contractor license to that of an Enterprise Employee license.

	Employee license	Contractor license
Store personal information	YES	YES
Store pay rate	YES	YES
Store diversity information	YES	YES
Store Contractor documents	YES	YES
Store Contractor notes	YES	YES
Report in report builder	YES	YES
Self service access	YES	NO
Add time off, timesheets, training, expenses etc	YES	NO
Trigger workflow against	YES	NO
Use in custom form	YES	NO
Store emergency contact information	YES	NO
Add custom fields	YES	NO
Benefits	YES	NO
Record manager, approver etc	YES	NO
Record start date, leave date, probationary date etc	YES	NO
Process via payroll	YES	NO
Store bank information	YES	NO

I need to store more information than a contractor license allows, but still need to differentiate between my contractors and employees?

If you have contractors where you need to be able to store things like their manager, add training or give them access to Natural HR, then you can add these using a normal employee license, giving you access to all the functionality in the table above.

When you add a contractor like this, you will most likely want to have a way of distinguish between employees and contractors, you can do this using the 'Job status' field by going to

Administration > HR > Data management > Job status

This field allows you to enter custom values for your organisation - you could have one for full time, part time and then contractor for example.

Once this is done, when adding or changing an employee you can assign them to this Job status.

This means that when you run a report, for example, you can filter on contractors (along with any other fields) giving you the ability to view data including or excluding contractors as and when required.

Alternatively, you could identify them as a contractor by adding an employee custom field, click here for more information on employee custom fields.

Natural HR Support

I need to store more information than a contractor license allows, but still need to differentiate between my contractors and employees?

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