Setting Up Subconsultants

BaseBuilders tracks what you owe consultants as soon as you bill your client for their work, not just when their invoice arrives. The mechanism that makes this automatic is linking each consultant's phases to your project's phases when you set up the agreement. Once that link exists, liability accrues on its own every time you invoice.

(For the full picture on why this matters — the cash flow risk of only tracking consultant costs when their pay requests arrive — see our complete guide.)

Adding a Consultant to a Project

From the project editor, open the Consultants tab and click Add a consultant. This creates the consultant record at the project level — company, contact, and an overall fee. Percent of Gross Fee is calculated automatically from that fee relative to the project's total; you don't enter it directly.

Linking Consultant Phases to Project Phases

This is the step that makes automatic liability tracking possible. Click the edit icon on a consultant to open their phase breakdown. You can import your project's existing phases or add custom ones — either way, every consultant phase needs to tie back to a parent project phase.

For each phase, you'll set:

• % of Project — the portion of the consultant's total fee attributable to that phase
• Format — Fixed Fee or Hourly, set independently per phase (a consultant can be fixed fee through Construction Documents and hourly for Construction Administration, for example)
• Fee — the dollar amount for that phase

Distribute Fee saves you from calculating each phase's dollar amount by hand: enter the consultant's total fee once, and it splits automatically across phases based on whatever % of Project values you've already set.

Pass-Thru and Extra Work

Two toggles on each phase affect how that phase's cost is handled:

Pass-Thru — when ON, that phase's consultant cost is treated as additional to the client contract and billed like a reimbursable expense (a markup can still be applied at billing time). When OFF, the consultant's fee is considered part of the firm's overall fee to the client — folded into the contract rather than broken out, and often not disclosed to the client as a separate amount.

Extra Work — flags a phase as outside the originally scoped work. This is primarily for reporting, so you can compare original scope against work that was added later — useful for spotting scope creep across a project or a portfolio.

Once Transactions Exist

Once a consultant has payout, pay request, or invoice activity recorded against them, some fields on their phase breakdown lock — you'll see a "Consultant Has Transactions" notice, and fields like Parent Project Phase and Format become read-only for phases that have already been billed. This protects the integrity of what's already been invoiced; new phases you add afterward remain fully editable.

Once consultants are set up this way, liability accrual, pay requests, and payouts run automatically — covered in the next article on monitoring subconsultant status.