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

For entities that aren't linked to a user (e.g., a contractor who doesn't use the app), admins can still create time entries on their behalf.

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.