Labor purchase orders: Create purchase orders for your crew
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When you hire freelancers or work with staffing companies, you need formal documents that clearly outline what you’ll pay them, not just for their rate, but for hotels, travel, meals, and other expenses. Whether you're bringing in lighting technicians for a multi-day festival or booking a full crew through a staffing agency for a corporate event, clear documentation protects both parties. Until now, creating these documents for your crew meant switching to external tools or manually preparing documents.
Labor purchase orders (POs) bring this into Rentman, letting you generate POs for your crew. Keep everything connected, from initial budgeting and scheduling to approved POs, no jumping between systems.
Try Labor POs today to:
- Generate purchase orders for freelancers and staffing agencies you work with
- Specify total costs including extra expenses such as hotel, lunch, or travel costs
- Avoid double work by managing your Labor purchase orders directly in Rentman
- Give finance teams documentation to match invoices to approved costs
How to use Labor POs in Rentman
Labor purchase orders follow your workflow, supporting you through each phase of crew planning:
Budgeting for crew costs
Track crew expenses alongside rates: In addition to paying freelancer crew members for their activities, you often need to cover extra costs such as hotels, travel, food, or per diem allowances. We're introducing Crew expenses as a way to budget for and track these costs for planned functions or scheduled crew.
As you prepare your project and define the functions you need, you can now add Crew expenses to each function. Categorize them as travel, lodging, meals, or "other" for items like per diems. For example, you might budget €60 for crew catering on a three-day shoot, or include a €150 hotel allowance for your lighting technician traveling from out of town. Set both the cost (what you'll pay) and price (what you'll charge) for each expense type. You can set these costs within your default functions for consistency across future projects, or set them per planned function within your project to keep them project-specific.
Tip: Check out the new "Expenses" default view in the Crew & transport tab to view and edit your crew expenses, per function, from the grid view.
Planning your crew
Once you've defined your functions and start assigning crew members, you have another opportunity to adjust Crew expenses for specific individuals. Maybe one of your lighting technicians is local and doesn't need accommodation, but another is flying in from another city and needs both a hotel and airport transfers.
Tip: Use the new "Expenses" default view in the Crew scheduling tab to edit these expenses in line, making adjustments quick, easy, and crew member-specific.
Creating and sending your Labor POs
When your planning is finalized, and Crew expenses are set, it's time to generate your Labor POs. Whether you're booking individual freelancers or working with staffing agencies that supply multiple crew members, you can generate Labor POs individually or in bulk.
This brings you to the PO sub-module that you may already be familiar with. From here, you can either self-approve or send the PO through your approval workflow if required. Once approved, generate the final PO document, which will include the function details and any Crew expenses if you’ve added them (Note: Crew expenses will show on default templates. If you have created your own template, be sure to add the ‘Crew costs breakdown' module). You can email this Labor PO directly to your freelancer or staffing company.
A note on PO templates: We provide a standardized PO template that works as a starting point for most companies. If your company or region has specific legal requirements, you can use our document template editor to duplicate and customize the template to meet your specific needs.
Need more details? Check out our complete guide to Labor POs here.
User permissions for generating Labor POs
To create Labor POs for your crew, you need to be a Power user with the following permissions enabled in your account:
Crew Planner:
- Change schedule ✓
Purchase Orders:
- Visible: All POs
- Create and edit POs: All POs
- Add crew activities to POs ✓ (new permission, automatically enabled if you already have the permissions above)
Optional:
- Approve POs ✓
Only needed if you self-approve purchase orders. If your company requires approval from another person, you'll follow the standard PO approval flow instead.
If you don't have these permissions, check with your account administrator to enable them so you can start creating Labor POs.
Get started with Labor POs
Create your Labor POs directly in Rentman to provide your freelancers with proper documentation for invoicing, reducing the risk of payment disputes. Labor POs are available for all users with Rentman’s Crew product and Quoting & Invoicing add-on. If you do not have access to this feature, you’ll need to upgrade your plan. Feel free to reach out to your CSM or Rentman’s support team for help.