In-house employees and external team members

Operating helps you plan the work for both in-house employees and externals.

Written By Matti Parviainen

Last updated About 1 month ago

People: Employees vs. Externals

Operating distinguishes between two types of people:

Definitions

Type	Definition	Examples
Employees	People on your payroll with defined working hours	Full-time staff, part-time employees
Externals	People you work with but don’t employ	Freelancers, subcontractors, agency staff, consultants

How to Mark Someone as External

When adding a person in the People view, check “Treat this person as an external” in the creation form. You can also edit the information in the Employment tab under the person’s profile.

You can customize the external label (e.g. EXT) in Settings.

How Externals Differ from Employees

Capacity & Availability

Behaviour

Employees

Externals

Available capacity

Calculated from working hours minus allocations

Not calculated — externals don’t have “idle time”

Externals’ capacity will show as “—” in the Capacity forecast."

Why?
Employees represent capacity you’re paying for whether they’re staffed or not.
Externals are engaged on-demand. You don’t track their “unused” capacity because it isn’t yours.

Cost Rates

Externals can have different default cost rates than employees:

Employee default cost: applies to internal staff
External default cost: applies to externals

You can also set person-specific and position-specific external costs to override the default when an external is assigned to a particular role.

To edit the person-specific cost, navigate to the person’s profile → Employment → Cost Rate
To edit the position specific cost for an external consultant, navigate to the Project/People view → click the Position (Person’s name on the project) → Edit Position → Override cost

Visibility in Reports

By default, externals are filtered out of capacity planning views unless:

They have planned allocations, or
They have logged time entries, or
You enable “Always show externals” in your own view options (Settings → View Options)

This keeps capacity reports focused on your internal team’s availability while still tracking external work when it exists.

TIP: In Capacity Reporting, externals’ capacity will show as a “—” but if you toggle the units to be hours, you can see how many hours they have work booked.

When to Use Each

Scenario	Mark as
Full-time designer on payroll	Employee
Part-time employee (20 hrs/week)	Employee (set individual working hours)
Freelance developer hired for a project	External
Agency providing temporary staff	External
Long-term contractor (works like an employee, different deal)	Your call. Depends if you want to track their capacity

Editing the tag to identify External people

You can edit how the external tag looks like in Settings → Organization → Externals