Vendor & Contractor Management in LeasePilot HQ: From Directory to Paid Invoice

The most expensive plumber is the one you call during an active leak with no prior relationship, no idea if they're insured, and no basis for whether their price is fair. LeasePilot HQ's vendor feature exists to make that call a non-event: the contractor is already in your directory, their insurance is on file and its expiry is tracked, they're pre-assigned as your preferred plumber for that building, and dispatching them takes one click that flows all the way through to a paid, categorized expense in your books. Here's how each piece works.

The directory: more than a phone number

You add a vendor from the Vendors page with Add vendor. Beyond the obvious company name and contact details, the directory holds the fields that actually make a vendor useful to reason about later:

• • Trade categories they cover (Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC, and so on) — the basis for matching them to the right jobs
• • Coverage area, entered as cities or zip codes, so the system knows where they actually work
• • Licensing, insurance, and pricing details like an hourly rate or trip fee
• • Availability, including whether they take emergency and after-hours calls
• • Financial fields — preferred payment method and tax ID — that are optional day to day but save you time at 1099 season

Document storage with expiry tracking

Expand any vendor and you'll find a Documents section built for the paperwork that actually matters with contractors: their W-9, Certificate of Insurance (COI), license, and signed contract. You tag each upload with its type so the paperwork stays organized, and — critically — you set an expiry date on the COI and license. LeasePilot HQ then tracks those dates for you. A document nearing its expiry gets flagged right on the vendor card, and the platform emails you a reminder before it lapses. The practical payoff is that you never dispatch a contractor whose insurance quietly expired three months ago — the kind of gap that turns a routine repair into a liability problem if something goes wrong on your property.

Preferred vendors, per property

Real portfolios don't use one plumber for everything. LeasePilot HQ lets you mark a preferred vendor per category on each individual property — a different plumber for your downtown building than for the suburban one. These preferences aren't a hard rule; you can still assign anyone manually. But they carry heavy weight when the system suggests who to send, which is the next piece.

Assigning a vendor: smart-suggested, not magic

Open a maintenance request, click Assign vendor, and LeasePilot HQ shows a ranked list of suggestions. It's worth being precise about what this ranking is and isn't: it's a simple rule-based score, not AI and not a prediction. The score rewards a vendor for:

• • Matching the request's category
• • Being the property's preferred vendor for that category
• • Covering the property's area
• • Having a higher rating
• • A faster past response time
• • Emergency availability, when the request is urgent

The ranking is a shortcut to save you from scrolling your whole vendor list under pressure — you always make the final choice. And the moment you assign someone, the request becomes a work order for that vendor.

The part that saves the most time: work order to expense

This is where the feature earns its keep. When the job is done, you upload the vendor's invoice against the work order, and LeasePilot HQ creates a matching expense automatically — categorized as Maintenance and tied to the correct property and unit. The invoice PDF stays attached to both the work order and the expense. There's no double entry: work you dispatch flows straight into your profit-and-loss report without you retyping the amount into a spreadsheet or a separate accounting tab. At tax time, the paper trail from "tenant reported a leak" to "deductible maintenance expense with the invoice attached" is already complete.

Performance stats you can actually use

Each vendor card carries stats calculated from their completed work orders — average response time, average completion time, and total spend to date. These aren't vanity metrics: total spend is directly useful at tax time and when you're negotiating a rate, and the response and completion times give you a real basis for deciding who to call next instead of relying on your memory of who "seemed fine last time." The numbers update automatically as work orders close.

Bidding out the bigger jobs

For work large enough to warrant comparison shopping, Request bids lets you send the same scope to several vendors at once. Each one submits a price and notes, you compare them side by side in a single view, and awarding the job creates the work order for the winning vendor — so the bid workflow lands in the same work-order-to-expense pipeline as everything else.

The vendor portal: let contractors do their own admin

Vendors don't have to route everything through you. Invite a contractor from their card and they get an email to set a password for their own portal — separate from the tenant portal, so they only ever see their own work. Inside it, a vendor can view their assigned work orders and update status, upload their own invoices (which still flow into your expenses automatically), and submit bids on jobs you've invited them to. For a busy contractor relationship, that's less back-and-forth for both sides.