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, which turns the whole platform on at once: the modules come with a paid plan and the free plan carries none of them, so a free workspace is shown 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 fill in a country pack for each jurisdiction you engage in if you want invoice-line suggestions (a draft pack is created automatically the first time you add a contractor there, and you activate it once its values are ready). 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 packs are your workspace’s own content, 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 pack is your workspace’s own tax content for one jurisdiction: the contractor withholding rules, their threshold bands, the tax lines that belong on an invoice there, and the documents you require. You own it. A draft pack appears automatically the first time you add a contractor or engagement in a country, so it turns up exactly where you need it; you fill in that jurisdiction’s values and activate it when they are ready. Only an active pack suggests anything: a draft or an unconfigured country suggests nothing rather than guessing, so the app never withholds on values you have not set. At invoice time the active pack suggests editable draft lines, matched to the engagement’s jurisdiction, and every suggested line records the pack it came from. 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. Changing a rate is an edit you make, not a release you wait for. India ships with starter values to build on; every other country you fill in yourself, which is the point, because the people who know a jurisdiction enter its values rather than trusting content we authored for a country we do not operate in. Treat a pack as a drafting aid your accountant signs off, never as tax advice.

No. This module is included in your plan at no extra charge, so contractors add nothing to what you pay however many you engage. The module keeps an internal meter of active contractors, but it never produces an invoice line: the only charge on your account is the plan per-seat rate on your employees past the first twenty, and contractors are not employees and never enter that count.

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. Because every module comes with the paid plan at no extra charge, none of this moves your bill: the plan is one price whichever modules a workspace is using. 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.