Testing the contractor experience

Want to see the whole flow end to end, from a contractor logging hours to you approving them? Here's how to try it yourself.

View as Contractor is a read-only preview

View as Contractor (on the contractors list and each contractor's page) shows you exactly what that contractor sees. It's a read-only preview: you can look around, but you can't enter hours or submit anything while viewing as them. If the contractor hasn't started a week yet, the preview shows No timesheet for this week yet — the contractor themselves will see a blank week to fill in.

To enter time, you need to sign in as the contractor for real, with their magic link.

Test it with an inbox you control

1. Add a test contractor with an email address you can open. If you use Gmail, add +contractor before the @ — for example yourname+contractor@gmail.com. Gmail delivers it to your normal inbox, and Templio treats it as a separate person. Other providers often support the same trick; otherwise use any spare address.
2. Place them on an Active placement. Only Active placements appear for the contractor to submit time against — a Draft placement never shows. If yours is Draft, open the placement, choose Compliance, save its IR35 status and click Activate placement. Its start date also needs to be today or earlier; for a placement that starts later, the contractor sees a "hasn't started yet" notice until its first week.
3. Send the invite. Use Invite on the contractor (see Inviting contractors).
4. Open the link in the email. You're now signed in as the contractor. Pick the placement, enter hours for the week and press Submit for approval (see How contractors submit timesheets).
5. Approve it. Back in your dashboard, the timesheet is waiting in Approvals, and the approver is emailed a sign-off link (see Approving and rejecting timesheets).

Tip: open the magic link in a private window or a different browser, so you stay signed in to your own dashboard in the other one.

Prefer ready-made data?

Apply demo data in the Getting Started checklist fills your workspace with sample contractors, placements and timesheets, so you can explore approvals and invoicing without setting anything up.