Contractors and agency staff often sit outside the systems that track employees, so their access ends up in a spreadsheet or in one person's memory. Folkbase gives them the same record as everyone else, with grants that are scoped down and dated. When the engagement ends, the access ends with it.
Same record, narrower scope
A contractor's record holds the same fields as an employee's: team, manager, location, job title, start date, and status. Contractors appear in the directory next to employees, so a manager filtering by team sees everyone who works on it, not only the people on payroll.
The difference is scope. Contractor is its own role in the workspace, with a narrower view than staff. Their grants tend to be narrower as well. An employee on the Design team might receive five tools from a role template, while a contractor on the same team holds two, each with a tighter scope. Every grant still records the tool, the scope, who granted it, and the role or request that justifies it.
| Employees | Contractors | |
|---|---|---|
| Record | One per person, in the directory | One per person, in the same directory |
| Workspace view | Set by role: admin, manager, or staff | Narrower and scoped |
| Grants | From the role template | Scoped grants, each with an end date |
| A grant closes | At offboarding, or when revoked | On its end date, at close-out, or when revoked |
An end date on every grant
Each contractor grant carries an end date, usually the last day of the engagement. The date lives on the grant itself, not in a calendar reminder or a ticket. When it passes, the grant closes.
No one has to remember the date, and no one has to sign in to each tool to remove an account. For connected tools, closing the grant in Folkbase closes the account in the tool.
Dates do not have to match across grants. A contractor can hold GitHub only for the build phase and Slack for the whole engagement, and each grant closes on its own date.
Extending an engagement
Engagements often run past the original plan. Folkbase treats more time as a decision, not a default:
- An extension is requested on a specific grant, with a new end date.
- A manager or admin approves or declines it.
- On approval, the grant stays active until the new date, and the change is written to the audit trail.
An extension always sets a new date, so a grant never drifts into open-ended access. If the Northwind rebrand runs two weeks long, Elio Park's grants get a new end date after one approval, and nothing else on the record changes.
A contractor's access ends on the date set when it was granted, unless someone approves a new one.
A close-out like any exit
When an engagement ends outright, the close-out is the same run used for employees. Set a last day. On that day every remaining grant closes in one action, each with the time it closed, and the record is archived with its full history. The offboarding page covers how the run works.
Contractor grants also show up in access reviews, since a review captures every active grant in the workspace. A reviewer can remove a contractor's access before its end date, and that decision is recorded on the record the same way it would be for an employee.