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I'd imagine that this is a critical function for most companies using Xero, we have over 30 employees and additional contractors and its just not practical to give all these their own logins to Xero. It doesn't seem like it would be a massive change for Xero to make to allow you to just list your employees and put a cost beside them to feed into the project costings

A lot of people don't have e-mail, let alone the technical ability to add time to projects. It would be great to have the ability for admin / manager staff to assign time to projects without the need to invite the user in.

I have the same issue and agree with Fiona McGregor and Michael Sitch.
You should be able to assign resources (whether labour or plant) to projects without giving them access.

I am entering all hours under my user and putting the employees name in the description as a workaround.

100% agree with this idea. We should be able to manually add time for an individual contractor or employee without having to invite them to the file as a Projects user.

One of my clients also uses projects to keep track of multiple projects that use multiple contractors (both company-to-company and direct via payroll (which allows us to pay their super for them as the ATO requires)). None of these contractors use Xero timesheets, they use timesheeting that meets Defence contract requirements. And company-to-company contractors wouldn't use timesheeting in our company file anyway, they'd use it in their own company file!

The only workaround we've found is to create each contractor as an estimated expense for each project that they're working on. We then assign each bill for each contractor's work to the estimated expense with their name on it. It's cumbersome and clunky but it lets me see useful information.

Assign staff to projects without having to invite them into the file
My client runs a maintenance business with external contractors doing the work. We want to be able to assign the contractors to the Project so we know which contractors have been assigned the work (as there could be up to 10 contractors doing parts of the one Work Order) but Xero won't let us do this unless the contractor is invited into the file.
We don't want this as we don't want any of the contractors to see any of the details of the jobs.

My clients do use payroll to process direct contractors, because Australia and superannuation, but there is absolutely no reason for those contractors to have access to the finances of a project. They don't need to see the internal profit and loss; they don't work for the company.

These contractors also don't use Xero timesheets, because they use and submit timesheets as per my clients' customer's requirements (gotta have approved timesheets attached when I invoice the customer) and getting them to do their timesheet twice is stupid time-wasting. So if I want to have their timesheets in Xero timesheets, in order to assign that timesheet to a Project, I have to manually enter each timesheet and assign it to the contractor as a Projects user, and that's a waste of MY time.

I currently do a workaround by creating a bill for each individual being paid through payroll, and assigning _that_ to the project, but I have to track the hours they've worked in a spreadsheet because the tax withheld means that I can't put 40 hours @ $30/hr = $1200 on the bill for that payroll since they actually get paid $1200 less tax plus super accrued (to be paid in a month).

I am looking at purchasing Projects for my company. However, I use around 40 contractors in my projects and obviously want to be able to allocate their time to my Projects. I do not want them to be Xero users. Currently I cannot do this unless I add them as employees (requiring Xero Licences for all of them and presumably a Payroll licence). Can you make these contractors available for me to add to my Projects (Maybe a flag on their Contact details?). As it stands I don't think I can use Xero Projects because of this.