Employees & Vendors

Employees and vendors are entities in Hourli.ai: the people or contractors who time entries are assigned to.

What's the Difference?

	Employees	Vendors
Who	Internal team members	External contractors or freelancers
Time entries	✅ Can have time entries	✅ Can have time entries
QBO sync	Syncs as Employee type	Syncs as Vendor type
User linking	Can be linked to an app user	Can be linked to an app user

Both types function identically within Hourli.ai. The distinction matters primarily for QuickBooks sync, where employees and vendors are different entity types.

Managing Employees

Navigate to Manage → Employees to:

• Add a new employee (name, email, external ID)
• Edit an existing employee
• Deactivate an employee (toggle active off, keeps historical entries)
• Delete an employee (only if no time entries are linked)
• Import from QuickBooks (if connected)

Managing Vendors

Navigate to Manage → Vendors for the same operations.

User Linking

When a user signs up and joins your organization, an employee entity is automatically created and linked to their account. This means:

• Time entries they create are automatically assigned to their entity
• Their dashboard shows their own hours
• The entity's email matches their Google account email

New time entries can only be assigned to employees or vendors with user access — either linked to a user, or pre-authorized (see below). Existing entries for other entities remain visible and editable.

Giving User Access (No Invite Needed)

Any employee or vendor with an email address can be turned into a user without sending an invitation:

1. Go to Manage → Employees (or Vendors), or Manage → Users → Add Employees & Vendors as Users
2. Click Give access on the record
3. Done — no email is sent, and there's nothing for them to accept

If the person already has a Hourli.ai account, they're added to your organization immediately. Otherwise they're pre-authorized: the first time they sign in with that email, they join automatically.

Billing note: a person uses a license from the moment you give them access — even before their first sign-in. You can remove the pre-authorization from Manage → Users → Pending Users, but the license stays paid through the current billing period; your next invoice reflects the lower count.

Prefer an email invitation instead? Use Send invite next to Give access (or Send invites in the Users page panel, or Manage → Users → Add User for someone not on your roster). Invited people must accept before they join, and don't use a license until they do.

Importing from QuickBooks

If QuickBooks is connected, you can import employees and vendors directly:

1. Go to Manage → Employees (or Vendors)
2. Click Import from QuickBooks
3. Select the records to import
4. Click Import

Imported entities retain their QuickBooks external ID for sync mapping. If an entity with the same external ID already exists, it won't be duplicated.

Email Uniqueness

Each email address must be unique within your organization across all entities. This ensures clean user-entity linking and prevents duplicate invitations.