Most questions about "why can't I see this" and "why is that price on my invoice" come down to where an address sits in its chain. The chain is simple, and it is worth knowing by heart.
One owner
Every address belongs to exactly one customer, and the business that holds that customer is the address's owner. The owner is the business that invoices the customer, sets the rules and contacts, and decides who does the work. Ownership does not move when the address is handed to a subcontractor. Only the work does.
A chain, not a tree
The owner can assign the address to one subcontractor. That subcontractor can assign it on to one subcontractor of its own, and so on. There is no limit to the depth. At each level there is at most one current assignee: an address is never "shared" between two subcontractors at the same level.
Owner → Subcontractor A → Subcontractor B → …
Each level writes its own link by editing the address and choosing its own assigned business. B does not know what the owner pays A, and the owner does not see B's prices.
Cost becomes price
When a business hands an address down, its Cost for each work type becomes the next business's Price for that address; the receiver's own cost starts at zero, and the pricing type (per task, per season, hourly) travels with it. Every level repeats this. So on a snow night:
- the owner bills the customer its price;
- the owner books A's work at the owner's cost, which is A's price;
- A books B's work at A's cost, which is B's price.
One completed stop therefore produces one customer line at the top and one settlement line per link in the chain, each at that link's cost. A business that declined the dispatch, or that has no price on the address, produces no line at its link.
Changing a price cascades down the existing chain without changing who is assigned. Each level still keeps its own rows and may edit them; your cost updates their price, their edits stay theirs.
What a reassignment does
Choosing a different subcontractor at any level severs the chain below that point: the displaced business loses its prices for the address, and everything it had handed on further down is undone. The address also leaves the displaced business's routes. The new subcontractor starts fresh, with your cost as its price and nothing below it.
Taking an address back (Unassign) does the same from that level down. On dispatches that were already created, every business that dropped out of the chain is taken off the stops it has not done yet while the dispatch is still planned or in progress; those stops fall back to the dispatching business until somebody decides who does them. Completed and cancelled stops keep their record. See Hand an address to a subcontractor.
Who sees and edits what
- Seeing. A business sees an address if it owns it, handed it down, or has been assigned it: the whole chain sees the address, nobody outside it does.
- Owner-only fields. Customer, contacts, notification emails, location groups and service rules belong to the owner. Subcontractors can add their own drawings, photos, notes and prices, and put the address on their own routes.
- Dispatching. Anyone in the chain with a live assignment may dispatch the address, unless a business above has switched May dispatch my addresses off for the one below, which follows the address all the way down.
- The customer sees none of this: the portal shows the property, planned and past work, photos and the owner's prices, but never the subcontractors or what they are paid.
You are told about one link, never two
You deal with the company you contracted with, and that is the company the platform names to you. A business further along the chain, your subcontractor's subcontractor, is never named: wherever its name would have appeared, you read the company that stands between you instead.
So if you own fifteen addresses, hand them to A, and A hands them to B:
- The dispatch is reported as A's, on the dispatch list, in the details panel, on the live map, in the stop's status history and in a route's drive record.
- The box that asks you to confirm the work before invoicing it says A, which is who owes you an invoice, and confirming A bills every stop that reached you through A, including the ones B actually worked.
- The address itself, the routes it sits on, the files on them, the complaints raised against them and the subcontractor line in your reports all say A. In the report, B's revenue, cost and call-outs are counted under A rather than listed as a company you have no contract with.
- If dispatching an address is refused because somebody switched it off, the message names the company that handed the address to you, which is the one you can ask about it.
People are named the same way. You see the name of your own people, of anyone a counterparty has shared with you, and of a direct counterparty's staff, because those are the people you can already put on your work. Anybody else keeps their pin on the map, their trail and their visit, but the line carries the company that sent them instead of a name, and no email address or photograph travels with it. The insurance report is the exception that proves the rule: it still states who was at the address, because that is what it exists to certify.
The same answer reaches the phone: a driver two companies down reads the company, not the names of people at the far end of the chain.
Customers are stricter still: the portal tells them nothing about subcontractors at all, not even the counterparty.
Invitations are the same link, waiting
An Invite instead of Assign now creates the same link, marked as awaiting the invitee's answer. Accept makes it live; decline removes it; the inviter can withdraw it while it is unanswered. There is no state in which a business is "invited but not assigned": the link is the assignment.