Contractor management and onboarding, inside your HRIS

Companies that engage independent contractors directly, in one country or several, and are currently running that relationship out of email and a spreadsheet: contracts in a folder, tax forms chased by hand, invoices approved in a mail thread, payments reconciled from memory. The buyer is usually the finance or operations person who owns that mess. It is not for companies that hire abroad through an employer of record, because Capstan is not one, and it is not for managing your own employees, who live in the free core whether or not this module is on.

A paid plan first: paid modules cannot be enabled on the free plan, so a free workspace is refused with an upgrade prompt rather than a subscription starting quietly underneath it. After that, most of the setup is contractor-side rather than company-side. You point engagements at the paying legal entities you already hold in the core, bind invoice approval to a workflow chain of the same kind your leave and expense approvals already use, and adopt a country content pack for each jurisdiction you engage in if you want tax-form resolution and invoice-line suggestions. Contractors then onboard themselves through their own portal, which is where most of the data entry actually happens. There is no importer for contractors, so an existing roster is typed in once.

It moves no money, ever. You pay a contractor out of band, by bank transfer, UPI, cheque or anything else, and record the payment with its mandatory reference; no payout rail exists inside Capstan and no client funds sit in it. It collects tax forms, W-8 and W-9 and their local equivalents, and never files them, because a contractor self-files. It does not decide worker classification for you: the optional questionnaire produces an informational risk indication, labelled in the product as not legal advice, and it never blocks an action by itself. It does not run employer-of-record employment. It does not turn a contractor into an employee, because a contractor is a distinct entity with its own engagement, deliberately outside employee headcount. And the country content packs carry indicative rates and thresholds pending jurisdiction review, so they are a drafting aid your accountant edits before submitting rather than tax advice.

It builds on the core rather than beside it. Contractor engagements use the legal entities, approval workflow engine, document store and notification ladder that the free core already runs, so an invoice approval routes the same way a leave request does. It is also the module other modules look for. Asset Management can issue a laptop against a contractor engagement while this is enabled and simply does not offer that option when it is not. Timesheets and Projects can log contractor time, and Helpdesk can accept contractors as requesters, both only while this is on. None of those modules breaks when it is off: the capability is absent rather than broken. Payroll never touches contractors at all, because contractor invoicing and payouts stay here permanently.

A country content pack is the tax content for one jurisdiction: the withholding rules, their threshold bands and the tax lines that belong on a contractor invoice there. You adopt a pack per jurisdiction, deliberately rather than with one button, and you choose whether to follow the newest published version automatically or pin the version you have reviewed. Adopting is reversible: withdrawing stops future suggestions for that jurisdiction and leaves the tax lines already on issued invoices exactly as they were. At invoice time the adopted pack suggests editable draft lines, matched to the engagement’s jurisdiction, and every suggested line records the pack version that produced it, so a year later you can answer which content ran on which invoice rather than reconstructing it. The pack is the default and your accountant is the authority: every suggested line is editable before submission, and re-applying a pack never touches a line a person wrote. Rates change by publishing a new pack version, not by shipping new code, so a change reaches you as content you can pin against rather than as a release you did not ask for. And the honest limit: the seeded India rates and thresholds are indicative. The machinery is production-ready and the content passes a jurisdiction compliance review before any live use, so treat a pack as a drafting aid your accountant signs off, never as tax advice.

No. The metered unit is the active contractor, and metering begins at the first active unit in a month. A contractor whose engagement has ended, or who was onboarded but never activated, costs nothing. Employees are never counted by this module: it bills on active contractors only, whatever your headcount is.

No. The free plan cap counts active employees. A contractor is a distinct entity in Capstan, never an employment, so a contractor never enters employee headcount, never consumes one of the twenty free places, and never appears in the per-employee seat count a paid plan bills on. The module bills on active contractors instead, on its own unit.

The contractor surfaces disappear from the app: the contractor list, the portal, invoicing and the payment records stop being reachable, and any option other modules offered because this one was on goes away with it. Billing stops at the end of the current period rather than on the day, and the period you are in is not refunded. Your contractor data is not deleted. It is retained on a schedule, and re-enabling within that window brings it back as it was. A full workspace export includes module data whether or not the module is currently enabled, so switching it off never puts your contractor records out of your reach. Nothing in the free core changes.